Tending to Our Wounds: A Diasporic Memoir
by Edna Bonhomme Haymarket Books 7/21/2026, paperback SKU: 9798888905951 A profound and poetic memoir, tracing the wounds that racism and colonialism have left on Black people across borders. With astute insight and immersive prose, Bonhomme outlines a personal and political history of life in the United States, Haiti, and Germany, discovering what it means to be Black at home and abroad. She unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism and explores how communities are resisting the weight of centuries of history. Whether examining debt, medical racism, art, or reparations, Tending to Our Wounds cuts a breathtaking course between the past and the present, the individual and the collective--identifying the tendrils of history in the everyday and outlining a path to real freedom. Reviews: "Tending to Our Wounds is no ordinary memoir. Edna Bonhomme plies her impressive skills as historian and writer to not only tell her stories but to revisit and reconstruct the traumas, revolts, and creativity of those who had once inhabited the places she called home. And in telling their stories she offers a brilliant accounting of what it cost Africans throughout the diaspora to enrich a European ruling class. The bill is past due."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "In Tending to Our Wounds, Edna Bonhomme takes us on a journey that beautifully weaves the personal memories of a Haitian-American, working-class Black woman with the history of colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism. As she settles in different cities--Berlin, New York, Cairo, Harlem, Port-au-Prince, Miami--she describes the mechanisms of white innocence, analyzes how racial systems deeply affect the psychic and physical life of Black people, and how people resist. It is a memoir of a political education anchored in her family's diasporic history, in Black joy and Black struggle."--Françoise Vergès, author of A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum "In this expansive, lyrical, and personal book, Edna Bonhomme crisscrosses the earth, tracking the injuries that racial capitalism inflicts, as well as the more-than-reparative logics of resistance that emanate from the 'alien' abolitionist undercommons of various Black diasporas. It is rare to experience memoir, history, and politics braided together so fluidly. A must-read, especially for anyone whose kin have been wounded by captivity and colonialism, or who needs reminding that their solidarity efforts are building, every day, a collective home whose name is freedom."--Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms and Femmephilia "Tending to Our Wounds traces Bonhomme's journey across Haiti, Florida, Portland, New York City, Cairo, and Berlin to examine how histories of racism and disenfranchisement shape the present. Melding rigorous research with her own diasporic experience, Bonhomme's sharp, unflinching language forges links between personal memory and broader structures of power."--Tessa Hulls, author of Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir About the Author: Edna Bonhomme is a critic, historian of science, and journalist. She earned a PhD in history from Princeton University and holds a Bachelor's degree in Biology and a Master's degree in Public Health from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The Nation. She is co-editor of After Sex, a literary anthology on abortion and reproductive justice, and the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues. Bonhomme has earned awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Robert Silvers Foundation, and is a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She has lived in Berlin since 2017.