This Thread of Gold

LoveReading Says

With delicate precision, and a gleaming voice, Catherine Joy White’s This Thread of Gold interweaves the incredible, inspirational stories of exceptional Black female disrupters with her own story of self-discovery. Traversing continents across time to the present-day, it simmers with resilience, recreation and reclamation, three pillars which inform the structure of the book.

Part One present portraits of Reclamation to “explore how Black women accept what they cannot change and reclaim it”. In the first chapter, the author shares the power of her own female lineage: “Women as fierce and mighty as they are brave, as vulnerable and sensitive as they are proud and as beautiful as they are strong”. Women who link her to “a tapestry, rich in its colours and delicate, complex detail”.

Throughout, the writing has such visual, poetic potency, whether the author is sharing her own experiences, or presenting the lives of notable Black female resistors, among them Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Diane Abbott; Aretha Franklin, Doreen Lawrence and Beyoncé.

With the dexterity of a master weaver, White draws the book’s components together with positive, wise beauty, as exemplified by this excerpt: “We know that if we just keep spinning, just keep weaving then the salt in our hands will eventually, overwhelmingly, irrevocably, transform into finest shimmering gold”.

Joanne Owen

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