Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity

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Once, missing her siblings, who by now had moved to university halls, she ran away in the night, walking for hours to find them, which resulted in a huge dressing-down. Publisher Rowan Cope, managing director Pete Duncan and sales, marketing and publicity director Matt Casbourne acquired world rights, including audio, directly from the author. Join Brixton Library’s Radical Readers to discuss Black Girl from Pyongyang, the extraordinary true story of a West African girl’s upbringing in North Korea under the protection of President Kim Il Sung. Macías also revealed in her book that she has come to take pride in Kim Il Sung as her second father, and that she had to hide her origins when she moved to the West because she was raised by two men known as brutal dictators. Ultimately I think the general idea is to point out that no matter our differences, we could all gain from being more open ot others and seek objectivity instead of reactivity when forming opinions and with that I can fully agree.

I think there is much value in her entreaty to consider the perspective we use to judge world leaders, because, as she points out, history is written by the victor (or, perhaps, in the case of North Korea, by the all-powerful Superpower), sometimes to the detriment of real progress.I constantly felt that there's a space between the book that has been intentionally written and the one that we are reading.

Despite all of this she makes some really good points about the cultures she has encountered along her travels in Spain, the U.Monica and her siblings were then educated and raised in North Korea, leaving only after they had each completed university. But I never asked until that moment when I saw my sister look so severe – she never raised her voice.