CALABASH WRITERS::POLITICS OF SKIN COLOUR::-OBAMA MOMENT

Treasure Beach Forum: TB Runnin's: CALABASH WRITERS::POLITICS OF SKIN COLOUR::-OBAMA MOMENT
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Thursday, February 05, 2009 - 04:04 pm: Edit Post

Reflecting on some poems by the Pulitzer Prize winning Yusef Komunyakaa, who read on the opening night of the Calabash Festival 2008 ("Two the Hard Way" with Chris Abani), I came across his memoirish, "The Colours In My Dreams," on the "politics of skin colour", while he was growing up in Louisiana.

It was published shortly before Barack Obama's Inauguration, & brought to mind how conscious the writers and participants of the Festival were so emotionally invested, anxious, fearful, hopeful, but circumspect in the Obama Quest.
As President Obama has said, "I am an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams". Like us, he is an Islander (Hawaii), but from
the Pacific Ocean realm, where the indigenous population are people of color, but few African Americans.

He also writes movingly and well in an early biography from his 20s, and even writing poetry in his youth for his high school literary magazine, the Ka Wai Ola. SAMPLE:

I saw an old forgotten man
On an old forgotten road
Struggling and numb under the glare of the
Spotlight. His eyes, so dull and grey,
Slide from right to left, to right,
Looking for his life, misplaced in a
Shallow, muddy gutter long ago.
I am a friend, instead.
Seeking a hiding place, the night seals us together
A transient spark lights his face, and in my honour
He pulls out forgotten dignity under his flaking coat,
And walks a straight line along the crooked world. (B.O.
(Written by a teenage "empathetic" jock, far more interested
in basketball at the time)

With a white north-american mother and a goatherd father from Kenya, who became a Harvard PhD, and a frustrated civil servant, once he returned to Kenya, Barack, growing up in Hawaii, would be referred to as a "hapa" to reflect his bi-racial seasonings.

In a press conference, without any self-consciousness, he called himself a "mutt".

In his quite literary-distinguished and probing memoir, Obama
uncovers his adolescent alienation and his search for racial identity. This is man with ancestors, who were slave owners on his mother's side, but no known history of the "taint" of slavery on his father's.
When he comes to the Mainland and enters public life in Chicago, as community organizer. lawyer, constitutional professor, elected office, the question that follows him, like a hungry dog: "Is He Black Enough?"

What Komunyakaa gets at in his brief remembrance is how far Barack has come in a miraculously speeded up history.
As he spoke across the National Mall to nearly 2 million, enthralled, well-behaved hopefuls (not one arrest), he acknowledged,almost cryptically, himself as "a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath".

There was not a hint of recrimination in that statement, but consider the fact that when his Kenyan father married his white,
pregnant, teenage mother in Hawaii in 1961, that marriage was
illegal, under anti-miscegenation laws, in at least 21 of the 50
dis-United States. Including, such mid-Atlantic states as Delaware & Maryland; Western states as Oklahoma & Utah;
Mid-West as Missouri & Nebraska and the stereotypically Jim Crow South as Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina...

At Obama's birth, voting rights for blacks were highly restricted, with such means tests as requiring black voting registrants to state the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or quantity of jelly beans in a jar.
At Obama's birth, there were separate accommodations for black & white in public transportation, restaurants, movies, hotels, as the protest battles for equality raged against officialdom's snarling dogs & high pressure fire hoses of the 60s.
Colin Powell, as a young soldier in the South, along with his wife and family, along with millions would have experienced such indignities and discrimination.

Across that same Mall, from which Barack Obama gave his address, at the Lincoln Memorial, two years after his birth in August 1963, Martin Luther King would give his "I Have A Dream" speech:

..."There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of Justice emerges.

..."I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character"

..."I must say to my people who stand on the worn threshold, which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

..."We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with SOUL force."
Out of the Soul Force, Barack Obama emerges!

Both Calabash Fest founders, Kwame Dawes & Colin Channer, speak eloquently of sifting through Reggae lyrics, music, lore, attitudes with its depth of morality and physicality, so why not, in this vein,Bob Marley:

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.

...How long can they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Some say its just a part of it:
We've got to fulfil de book.

...my hand was made strong
By the and of the almighty
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
Cause I ever have:
Redemption Songs.

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA: THE COLOURS IN MY DREAMS

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/01/16/ST2009011603428.html

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/15/AR2009011503567.html

CALABASH FEST WRITERS: ON THE "OBAMA MOMENT" ETC,

www.radioopensource.org/calabash-08-part-2-as-others-see-us/
(Scroll down to Yusef Komunyakaa & Listen to Chris Lydon's
Interviews with Calabash Authors)

A MOVING REFLECTION ON REETIKA VAZIRANI, A POET, & THE ROMANTIC PARTNER OF YUSEF KOMUNYAKKA, who committed suicide and took the life of their son, Jehan, in 2003. Issues of the Moods of Creativity, "cultural straddling", and "Otherness" are explored.

www.sohel.net/2004/02/failing-light-despair-of-poet-dear.html


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Friday, February 06, 2009 - 02:12 pm: Edit Post

MORE RADIO INTERVIEWS FROM CALABASH FEST 2008:
THE FEUD OF THE CARIBBEAN "NOBELS", WALCOTT gets "nasty"
with Naipaul ("The Mongoose")

www.radioopensource.org/calabash-08-first-the-fireworks

Interviews with Lorna Goodison, Thomas Glave & Kwame Dawes
(in depth):

www.radioopensource.org/calabash-08-reggae-the-obama-moment/

CALABASH MEMORIES REVISITED: (Multiple Video Clicks)

www.youtube.com/watchv?v=v_OdvStnHC4


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Saturday, February 07, 2009 - 11:10 am: Edit Post

"NATIVE SON" :: "BLACK BOY":: RICHARD WRIGHT...

Continuing Yusef Komunyakaa's theme of "Dreaming" in the Act of
Creativity...

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR2009020603569.html


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By Sally on Sunday, February 08, 2009 - 06:42 am: Edit Post

We have come a VERY long way.


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By Concerned on Sunday, February 08, 2009 - 06:01 pm: Edit Post

It would be nice if you would post your last name or initial to protect others that shares the same name and frequent this site also.


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 - 11:21 am: Edit Post

Marlon James (Calabash storyteller, huge Caribbean presence,
with a signature voice) has just had published a Big Read Novel
(432 pages) to glowing reviews...Book of Night Women


No one, who has attended his readings, or observed the respect in which he is held by his fellow writers, should be surprised. A "writer's writer" comes to mind. The esteem of his novel, John Crow's Devil was to be short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize.

Just a hint of the praise comes from Calabash Fest's founder Colin Channer, "the Professor". His blurb for the Novel:

"With Book of Night Women, Marlon James proves himself to be Jamaica's answer to Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Zadie Smith. James imbues his lively, energetic prose and unforgettable characters with a precocious wisdom about love, race, and history that none of us have ever seen before, but feel alive, even definitive, as soon as we read it."

Others are honestly comparing James, with the arrival of this novel, to "William Faulkner in another skin", and early Toni Morrison (Beloved) and the godfather of "magical realism", Gabriel Garcia Marquez...some good company, whose style, themes, and concerns seem always to survive their "novel moment".

Some Reviews:

www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0214-book-of-night-womenfeb14,0,46 02753.story

www.bookslut.com/fiction/2009_01_014019.php


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 - 11:45 am: Edit Post

Review: Book of Night Women by Gail Lumet Buckley

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/16/AR2009021601152.html?wp rss=rss_print/style