At the age of 40, award-winning journalist Afua Hirsch embarked on a transformative journey after getting her first tattoo. This experience led her to challenge and reclaim her body from the colonial notions of purity, adornment, and aging that she, like many others, had internalized while growing up.

In her exploration, Afua draws on research from around the world, examining how individual and collective ideas of beauty are shaped or dismantled. Through personal anecdotes, interviews with beauty experts, practitioners, and individuals with diverse experiences, she delves into the global history of skin, hair, and body modification rituals. The narrative explores how these practices have influenced our self-perception.

By sharing insights and discoveries, Afua empowers readers to reconnect with their cultural roots, comprehend the intricate relationship between beauty and politics, and break free from mainstream beauty standards that may not be serving their true identities.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

After turning forty, Afua Hirsch embarked on what she dubbed her “year of adornment” a mixture of personal and political quest, which used her own experiences as the starting point for a wider inquiry and series of reflections on her disrupted bodily heritage. Her focus is on ways of being in the world, her embodied self and how it echoed her position as a woman of colour who grew up in a predominantly white, Western society. Hirsch wanted to find out more about her lost “ancestral legacies” and how these might trouble Eurocentric notions of physical and spiritual beauty. Her journey takes in puberty rituals and how these connect to rites of passage from the onset of menstruation to menopause. She examines forms of knowledge handed down from generation to generation that sustained and centred women of colour, forms displaced or shattered by the broader project of European colonialism and its devastating impact on notions of the relations between mind and body. An invasive process that was as much spiritual as it was physical, weaponizing belief systems like Christianity.

It's a short book, barely 200 pages but it draws on a rich array of sources from conversations with artists like Majida Khattari to the thoughts of writers like Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Not quite as incisive as I’d hoped and some sections felt a little too disjointed and meandering at times but still compelling, engaging and intriguing. I found some elements a little eyebrow-raising, possibly because I’m far too steeped in Western concepts of the divide between mind and body. But I was fascinated by much of Hirsch’s discussion particularly the sections on tattoos and scarification, and the exploration of the politics of hair removal which brought in images of the legendary Queen of Sheba to the cultural significance of waist beads to Rihanna’s phenomenally successful make-up line.

It may be short book, but Afua Hirsch packs a mighty punch with a deep exploration of beauty and rituals, more specifically related to her own heritage. Not dissimilarly to Emma Daibiri's recent book 'Disobedient Bodies', it attempts to deconstruct the Western ideals of beauty as the author goes on their own journey to discovering radical self-acceptance. Regardless of who you are, I think there's something to be gained from this book, even if it's just how unattainable so many standards of beauty are and how we should be listening to our own bodies and doing things that are good for us rather than trying to fit into an impossible mould given to use by people on Instagram.

Having loved Hirsch's 'Brit-ish', I was delighted to see that her new book picked up on similar ideas and took them further, acting as a wise and insightful book on the ways that we move through the world.

Mining through her family history, and looking to the future, Hirsch walks the reader through a set of personal and thoughtful reflections on what it means to give yourself to the world, whether capitalism or your family, what it means to wear certain styles of clothing and hair, and what it means to resist the received ideas of what is 'correct.'

She is a writer who I always find deeply engaging for the ways that she does not need to find a concrete answer to be satisfied that the journey was worth it.

I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Decolonising My Body was like a conversation with a wise friend who has thought deeply about the issues you've vaguely considered but never examined fully.

Hirsch navigates white supremacy and late stage capitalism by going back to basics, listening to her own body and the words and traditions of her ancestors. There's a message for all of us here, asking us to examine our own preconceptions and actions, asking whether they're helpful for us to hold on to. Have we discarded older healthy ways of being in the quest for conformity with ideals we don't even believe in?

A very thought provoking read.

Such important and insightful reading.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of the book in exchange for a review.