Nina Swamidoss McConigley

"A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece's private confession to the reader-she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British"--

A Novel

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder

Jemima Scott

It is an acknowledged truth that to be a girl is to be extracted. Girls, we are taken.

Lindsay

I’m not sure if that’s how it works. I’m not sure you can ever cancel out someone who has taken from you by taking more from someone else.

Does it bother me that you want to hear the story this way? Yes. Does it make me angry that you need all of these specific details to feel like you’re reading a proper brown- person story? Yes.

This is what being a girl is like. Holding yourself in a specific position, only moving when someone tells you to.

Okay, what about yoga? That’s how you think of our bodies, right? Twisted and pliant. When people ask me if I do yoga, when they look to me in a class, I move to child’s pose. Lying on the ground. Head bent. Knees bent. I’m not a threat. 

“You’re not very flexible,” teachers say. 

And I think, I have bent so much in my life, I can’t move anymore. I am so accommodating I can barely breathe. 

But now I rise into mountain pose, facing you. Now I’m ready to impose, to tell you what happened.

But were we really sinners if all we wanted was to be safe?

The tree girl must be treated gently; you’re only supposed to pick the flowers, nothing more. 

But someone always wants more. Someone always takes too much.

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