Review: Repair by Blandine Emilien – ‘A thoughtful and ultimately hopeful book exploring the misconception, doubt and anger surrounding EDI’

“We live in a world in which equality, diversity and inclusion have become boiled down to the hard acronym EDI, a cliché to be supported or opposed.

“The current US administration has been at the forefront of suggesting that this is an example of woke ideology, a way of thinking which is unfair, exclusionary, elitist and so on. EDI must be replaced by common sense and fairness, and many of the people marching on streets under fluttering national flags agree with them.

“In January 2025, Donald Trump suggested that diversity programmes played a role in a collision between a passenger jet and helicopter in Washington DC. 67 people were killed. The President suggested that people with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities” could be hired as air traffic controllers and this could be to blame for the crash. The dog whistle was that women, gay people, people of colour, people with disabilities were being placed into jobs they couldn’t do properly. EDI causes planes to crash. When challenged by reporters about why he believed this, he responded: “Because I have common sense”.

Book cover – photo: Austin Macauley Publishers

“In this novella, the author (now a lecturer at the University of Bristol) tells us the story of another example in which EDI became a small battleground, this time at a university in Canada. Blandine Emilien reminds us that within these bureaucratic processes are people, individuals who are named as being unequal, not uniform or excluded.

“She was shaped by EDI, made into a complaining black woman who needed to have the realities of life and career explained to her. Or an anti-racist campaigner sitting on an anti-racist committee. Or an ally for black students from different places in the world who imagined she shared their experience. ‘EDI moments’, she calls them.

Blandine Emilien – photo: courtesy of the author

“It’s not a pessimistic book though, not just a story of misrecognition, doubt and anger because it’s also a story about how she put herself back together again, in part thanks to a move to Bristol. The root of the word ‘repair’ means to make yourself ready, to prepare for what comes next. The author is not a victim in this book, not someone constructed by the language of EDI with all the confusion and insensitivity which that brings. Any institution should care about equality, and about diversity, and about inclusion, but bureaucracies – even when populated by the well-intended – can bruise and shame.

“Blandine Emilien’s little book moves her from Mauritius to Bristol, via Montreal. It’s a story of migration, just like the stories of the people she does research with. Her repair makes this reader happy, and I hope she doesn’t have too many EDI moments in this place.”

Repair by Blandine Emilien is out now from Austin Macauley Publishers.

Main photo: Blandine Emilien

Read next:

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• Suzannah V. Evans publishes acclaimed debut collection: ‘Under the Blue’
• ‘Diversity, equity and inclusion is more necessary than ever before in an increasingly polarised world’