Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity

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I enjoyed this for its honesty, for her remarkable and truly fascinating story, for the insight she provides into life in North Korea, for the spotlight, however flawed, on Equatoguinean life, and for her perspective on life as an eternal migrant in Spain, the US, the UK, South Korea, and other places. There are many highlights, and I loved that she included so many photographs. Her account of her first visit to China from North Korea is hilarious, and sad. In all, Macias is a brave and complex woman, and I’d love to invite her to that hypothetical dinner party. My connection to the society I grew up in is partly emotional, but I do have the capacity for dispassionate legal analysis. The moment that emotion interferes with analysis, the analysis can become sloppy.”

Macias: Daughter of African dictator tells of life Monique Macias: Daughter of African dictator tells of life

Monica resolved to visit another of her cousins, now Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador in Beijing. Arriving in the Chinese capital, using her Equatorial Guinean passport, she could find no one who spoke English (which she’d studied at school). A white man approached her and asked if she needed help. Monica, hearing his US accent, was petrified and ran away. “My reaction was normal. It was how I’d been brought up. The West was evil, especially Americans. There couldn’t have been any other way. That was the consequence of being brainwashed.” The life story of Monica is a very unique and is certainly worth reading. However, I feel like a lot of information of her research towards her father is left out, not mentioning one neg a b Buale Borikó, Emiliano, ed. (1989). El laberinto guineano. Debate político. Madrid: IEPALA Ed. ISBN 978-84-85436-73-6. I must admit I am not too familiar with her father's story and I don't feel I am fit to talk about much of Guinean's history either although I can agree on her thoughts on decolonisation.But you don’t have to buy all of Macias’s conclusions to admire her attitude. As social media algorithms herd us all into bubbles which “protect” us from the discomfort of differing worldviews, we could all learn a lot from her lifelong quest to challenge her own prejudices. She remains open minded and makes no claim to have access to absolute truths. We can apply her commitment to critical thinking on smaller scales too, always asking ourselves who has a vested interest in spinning which stories. We might still decide that some people really are the baddies. But we should all, constantly, be questioning the symbols on our own hats. At university she discovered literature. She mostly read the Russian classics but found Korean translations of Jane Austen and Shakespeare, too. She couldn’t finish reading Hamlet, because the parallels with her own life were too disturbing. “But what it showed me is my story isn’t the only one. It won’t be the first, nor the last one. It’s just one story of human society,” she said. Eburi Palé, José (16 June 2008). "Marzo de 1969. La suerte de las familias españolas abandonadas en Guinea" . Retrieved 29 April 2017. Macías, as a girl, in the uniform of the North Korean army, next to a highway near Pyongyang. Personal album of Mónica Macías She took a leap of faith and had to adjust to life outside of North Korea in a capitalist society, while reconciling the legacy of her two parents.

Black Girl from Pyongyang review: a daughter of two dictators

Within just a matter of months, her father had been executed in a military coup; her mother became unreachable. Effectively orphaned, she and two siblings had to make their life in Pyongyang. At military boarding school, Monica learned to mix with older children, speak fluent Korean and handle weapons on training exercises. Con la llegada al poder de Macías la economía se desplomó". El País. 10 August 1979 . Retrieved 7 February 2017. The author is the daughter of Francisco Macias, the president of Equatorial New Guinea, another country that I know nothing about, and had sent his daughter Monica to be brought up and educated in North Korea under the guidance of Kim II Sung at the age of 8. a b Blas Piñar (20 April 2012). " "Escrito para la Historia": La independencia de Guinea (Capítulo 12)" . Retrieved 5 December 2016.However the book described Monica’s schooling, including the University of Light Industry in Pyongyang, her travelling and her various jobs but without going into any detail about her day to day life which I found disappointing. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. Smith, Julia Llewellyn (24 March 2023). "From one dictator dad to another: Monica's lost childhood in North Korea". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 2 April 2023. Gardner, Dan (6 November 2005). "The Pariah President: Teodoro Obiang is a brutal dictator responsible for thousands of deaths. So why is he treated like an elder statesman on the world stage?". The Ottawa Citizen. Archived from the original on 12 June 2008.

Growing up as a Black girl from Pyongyang – gal-dem

stars. A deeply intriguing and unique memoir of growing up in the Hermit Kingdom. Certainly the first I've read in defense of that state, and a reminder that we in the West are fed a very pejorative and slanted view that has little appreciation of the world from the North Korean point of view. a b c d e f g h i j Suleiman, Rashid. "Macias Nguema: Ruthless and bloody dictator". Afroarticles.com. Archived from the original on 4 November 2014 . Retrieved 1 December 2014. Denuncia al presidente guineano por "liquidar" sin piedad a sus opositores". El País. 20 December 1978 . Retrieved 30 May 2016.Daniel Radcliffe breaks down in tears in FIRST trailer for documentary about his Harry Potter stunt double who was left paralysed in horror film set fall Jessup, John (1998). An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Conflict and Conflict Resolution, 1945-1996. Greenwood Publishing Group. p.441. ISBN 9780313281129 . Retrieved 8 April 2017.

Communism, uprooting and dictatorships: Mónica Macías, the

She said: ' Although North and South say they want unification, they don't actually know each other as people. If we want unification, we have to bury prejudice.' a b Daniels, Anthony (29 August 2004). "If you think this one's bad you should have seen his uncle". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 6 March 2023 . Retrieved 7 August 2021. Feeling abandoned by her family, the young Monica struggled to fit into Korean society. At first she rebelled against its military discipline but eventually chose Korean culture over her own. Her Great Leader had promised her father that he would educate her and send her home to serve her own country. So he employed a Spanish teacher to ensure she kept up with her native language, but she refused to learn it and cleaved ever closer to Kim’s dictatorial regime, until the incident with the Syrian student and the newspaper. Francisco Macías, un tirano fruto del colonialismo español". El País. 5 August 1979 . Retrieved 30 May 2016. Malabo: EI fiscal pide la pena de muerte para Macías". La Vanguardia. 28 September 1979 . Retrieved 1 March 2017.Macias is the daughter of the late Francisco Macias, the erstwhile leader (/dictator) of Equatorial Guinea, which attained its independence from its coloniser Spain in 1968. The regime was harsh and she rebelled. 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. “I was very lonely,” she says. She was banned from spending time outside school with her friends. It took years before Kim Il-sung granted her a special permit to leave school at weekends to visit her siblings and two former schoolmates, the sons of the president of Benin, who by then were living in a hostel for foreign students along with the handful of Russians, Chinese and Syrians studying in Pyongyang. The trip sowed more doubt, not least after she ended up singing karaoke with tourists from South Korea, people she’d been brought up to pity as American puppets. She returned to Pyongyang, but was questioning her hermetic society even further. “It was as if I had walked onto a movie set and was reciting my lines of dialogue from an approved script.” Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops