ABANDONMENT & SLAVERY: THREE MEMOIRS ON A MOTHER’S LEGACY

In How to Be Unmothered: A Trinidadian Memoir, Camille U. Adams maps the fault lines between mother and child against the backdrop of Trinidad’s colonial violence and her family’s legacy of abandonment. Tormented by her mother’s presence and haunted by her absence, Adams presents an account of survival and self-determination, reimagining the meaning of escape, its cost, and what comes after. Sasha Bonét’s The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters is a meditation on Black motherhood. Bonét grew up far from the plantations that shaped her ancestors, yet each generation carried the legacy of Black motherhood rooted in slavery. Determined to interrupt this tradition, she seeks to create a way of mothering that honors that legacy but abandons the violence that shaped it.

Buy How to be Unmothered: A Memoir – Adams

Buy The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters – Bonét