Founder’s Shelf: July Reads
Three books on ritual, inheritance and memory.
This month’s shelf focuses on spiritual initiation, mother daughter wisdom and the violence of state betrayal.
They are all very different books, but together ask similar questions.
What do we inherit?
What do we carry?
What do systems try to make us forget?
And what does it mean to return to the truth of who we are?
1. Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman - Malidoma Patrice Somé
A memoir rooted in Dagara spiritual tradition, initiation and return.
Malidoma Patrice Somé writes about being taken from his community as a child, educated through a colonial religious system, and later returning to his people and their spiritual practices. It is a book about rupture, memory, ritual and the long road back to ancestral knowledge.
Read for: ritual, spirituality, African cosmology, initiation, ancestral memory
Best read when: you are thinking about what has been lost, what has been interrupted and what can still be remembered
Listen note: A book for anyone thinking seriously about cultural roots, spiritual inheritance and the cost of disconnection.
2. Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter - J. Nozipo Maraire
Written as a letter from a Zimbabwean mother to her daughter, Zenzele is tender, political and deeply intimate.
It holds the shape of advice, but also of memory. Through one mother’s voice, the book speaks about womanhood, home, education, family, tradition and the tensions that come with leaving and returning.
Read for: motherhood, daughterhood, Zimbabwe, home, inheritance, womanhood
Best read when: you are thinking about what mothers pass down beyond words
Listen note: A beautiful companion to Listen’s ongoing interest in motherhood, belonging and the stories women carry for each other.
3. The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment - Amelia Gentleman
A clear and necessary account of the Windrush scandal and the hostile environment that made it possible.
This is not an easy read, but it is an important one. Amelia Gentleman traces the lives of people who were wrongly treated as illegal immigrants by the British state, despite having the right to live in the UK. It is a book about paperwork, power, borders, memory and the violence of being told you do not belong in a place you helped build.
Read for: British history, migration, citizenship, state violence, Caribbean communities
Best read when: you want to better understand how policy becomes personal
Listen note: Essential reading for thinking about belonging in Britain beyond sentiment.
This month’s shelf is about return.
Returning to spirit.
Returning to the motherline.
Returning to the truth of history.
Each book asks us to look at what has been severed, whether by colonial education, migration, silence or state power. Together, they sit at the centre of so many Listen questions: who gets to belong, who gets remembered and what forms of knowledge are treated as legitimate.