Mosaic 28 by Mosaic Literary Magazine

CARYL PHILLIPS

ANDREA LEVY

THE GREAT MIGRATION

L I T E R A R Y M A G A Z I N E

EDUCATOR LESSON PLANS

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ISSUE

TWENT Y EIG

Interviews Caryl Phillips by Clarence V. Reynolds ....................................................... 8 Camille T. Dungy by L’Oréal Snell ............................................................. 16 Andrea Levy by Tracey L. Walters .............................................................. 40

Excerpts Color Me English: Thoughts About Migrations and Belonging Before and After 9/11 by Caryl Phillips ......................................................................................... 13 The Long Song by Andrea Levy ................................................................... 44

Poems by Camille T. Dungy Maybe Tuesday Will Be My Good News Day ............................................. 18 The Blue .................................................................................................... 19

Mosaic Lesson Plans ........................................................................................ 20 Lesson plans for high-school educators Designed by Eisa Nefertari Ulen

Reviews .......................................................................................................... 28 Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora Edited by Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson Chike and the River by Chinua Achebe

Around Town by photographer Marcia E. Wilson ............................................. 38 Booklyn Moon Revisited by Ron Kavanaugh

Cover photograph: WideVision Photography/Marcia E. Wilson

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Editor & Publisher Ron Kavanaugh ron@mosaicmagazine.org FB/Twttr: mosaicliterary Mosaic Literary Magazine (ISSN 1531-0388) is published by the Literary Freedom Project. Content copyright © 2012. No portion of this magazine can be reprinted or reproduced in any form without prior permission from the publisher. Ubiquity Distributors Brooklyn NY 718.875.5491 Individual Subscriptions One year: $15.00 | Two years: $25.00 Subscribe online: MosaicMagazine.org Institution Subscriptions EBSCO 1.205.991.6600 or WT Cox 1.800.571.9554 Contact the editor We welcome comments. Send e-mail to info@mosaicmagazine.org Please visit MosaicMagazine.org for submission guidelines. Colophon Layout Software: Adobe InDesign CS5 Graphic Software: Paint Shop Pro 12 Mast Typeface: Whomp Editorial Typeface: Zapf Humanist Mosaic is made possible with the support of members and subscribers as well as with public funds from the Bronx Council on the Arts through The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Greater New York Arts Development Fund Regrants Program and The New York State Council Arts Decentralization Program. Program support has been provided by Poets & Writers. POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: Mosaic 314 W. 231 St #470 Bronx, NY 10463

Nuruddin Farah at the 2011 Brooklyn Book Festival. Go to page 44 to view additional pho4 MosaicMagazine.org tos of writers “AroundTown.”

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CONTRIBUTORS

Can you imagine our embarrassment: Kim Coleman Foote interviewed Tiphanie Yanique in Mosaic #27 and we forget to credit her. Big Up, Kim for your patience and understanding.

Clarence V. Reynolds, an independent journalist, is the assistant director at the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and a contributing writer for The Network Journal.

Kim Coleman Foote is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Obsidian, The Literary Review, Black Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere. Honors include the Rona Jaffe Foundation/Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, PALF Africana Creative Nonfiction Award, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. She is currently working on an African-female-centered novel about the slave trade in 18th-century Ghana, where she was a Fulbright Fellow.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning. She has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Heart & Soul, Vibe, Black Issues Book Review, Quarterly Black Review of Books, and CreativeNonfiction.org. Ulen graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. A founding member of Ringshout: A Place for Black Literature, she teaches English at Hunter College in New York City. www.EisaUlen.com.

.......

Tracey L. Walters is Associate Professor of Literature in the Department of Africana Studies at Stony Brook University where she also holds an affiliate appointment with the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Dr. Walters works in the areas of Pan African Literature, African American Women’s Literature, and Black British literature. She has published a number of articles on the subject of African Diasporic Women’s literature and two books: African American Women and the Classicists Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (Palgrave 2007) and edited the collection Zadie Smith: Critical Essays (Peter Lang 2008). Walters is currently working on a multimedia project on Caribbean nannies in New York.

Deatra Haime Anderson is a writer and editor living in Dutchess County, NY. D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist, teacher, curator. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes review, and is a regular contributor to The East Bay Express, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Mosaic Magazine. Fatima Shaik is the author of four books and numerous articles set in New Orleans. A native of the 7th ward, she is completing a non-fiction account of the Société d’Economie (Economy Society) and its radical, political and multi-ethnic black community who stepped onto the world’s stage, then disappeared. L’Oréal Snell is an aspiring drama therapist and poet. Her poems appear in Ithaca College’s IC View, Coon Bidness Literary Journal, three Cave Canem anthologies, Reverie: Midwest African American Literature, and theblackbottom.com. She has been a featured poet at the Shadow Lounge in Pittsburgh and The Studio Museum in Harlem. L’Oréal holds a MFA from Chatham University and is currently pursuing a MA in Drama Therapy at New York University.

Born in London, England; Marcia Wilson’s photography has documented many writers of the African Diaspora. Her photos have appeared in Vibe, Publishers Weekly, Black Issues Book Review, LA Weekly, and QBR. She has exhibited at The National Black Writers Conference, Medgar Evers College, New Haven Public Library, New York Public Library (Flatbush branch), and Air Gallery. She currently resides in Brooklyn. Visit www.WideVisionPhotography.com for additional information.

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Caryl Phillips appears to be a man of a composed and modest nature. He’s relaxed in his T-shirt and leather jacket; he also presents the aura of a seasoned traveler. When he talks about the craft of writing and literature in general, his voice is calm and measured. But on the page, his voice resounds with compassion, elegant pacing, and vigorousness. In both his fiction and nonfiction, a dominant theme in Phillips’s absorbing prose is the exploration of the varied perspectives of the immigrant experience, the feelings of acceptance and isolation in the places one chooses to live. He was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, and after his family moved to England he grew up in Leeds, in northern England; and attended The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, where he studied English literature. A prolific writer, Phillips is the editor of two anthologies and the author of more than a dozen titles, including plays, five nonfiction books, and nine novels. He has written for radio and film: In 1984, his radio play The Wasted Years was published in Best Radio Plays of 1984; he wrote the screenplay for the 2001 film The Mystic Masseur, based on the novel of the same name, which was written by Trinidadian author and Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul. In his early twenties, he “declared that I wanted to be writer,” and over the course of his career, he’s received well-deserved accolades and literary awards for his works. In 1985, the Greater London

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CARYL

WideVision Photography/Marcia Wilson

PHILLIPS

by Clarence V. Reynolds MosaicMagazine.org

Council awarded Phillips the Malcolm X Prize for Literature for this his debut novel, The Final Passage. For his acclaimed book Cambridge (1991), the story of a slave in the West Indies in the 19th century, he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, in 1992. His novel Crossing the River, about a father who sold his children into slavery and their stories that beautifully unfold, was shortlisted for England’s prestigious Man Booker Prize in 1993. His novel A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark, a fictionalized account about the life of Bert Williams, an African-American vaudeville entertainer, won the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. This is quite impressive for a person who stated that “Writing provides a means by which I can sit in judgment upon myself and reach conclusions (however temporary) that enable me to shuffle towards the next day and another crisis.” Phillips is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He has taught at universities in Africa, India, Sweden, and the United States. He is a former Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, was a visiting professor of English at Amherst College in Massachusetts, and is presently professor of English at Yale University. This past fall, Phillips stood before a packed auditorium at the Dweck Center at the Central Library/Brooklyn Public Library in New York and read from and discussed his latest book, Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11. He talked also about nationality, creating characters, the elements that make up a novel, and his process when he begins a project. He commented that in his writing, the complexity of the

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elements of identity fascinates him: identity as it has to with nationality and participation in society; identity as it has to do with the color of ones skin; identity as it applies to the meaning of being a writer; and identity that is personal. A few days after the talk at the library, he was off traveling, to London and then to Singapore. I caught up with Phillips via e-mails during his travels for a further exchange about his writing and his thoughts about literature. Clarence V. Reynolds: I was introduced to your writing when I read the story “West,” which was later a chapter in Crossing the River, in Granta in 1993. You were featured as one of that literary journal’s “Best of Young British Novelists.” Looking back, what are your earliest ideas and remembrances about becoming a writer? Caryl Phillips: My earliest notions of becoming a writer were rooted in the fact—rightly or wrongly—that I felt I had something to say about the experiences of my generation of black Britons back in the late seventies. I thought the best way of expressing my feelings would be to write drama and/or fiction. …. I’m not sure if the Greater London Council prize exists any longer, but 1985 was the first year it was awarded. And what made it special was the fact that James Baldwin came over from France to present the prize. I don’t think the organizers realized that we already knew each other. It was a special moment for me to be given the prize by a writer I admired. CVR: Your latest book, Color Me English, is a collection of personal essays about belonging, finding one’s place in the world, cultural awareness, and attitudes toward people of different backgrounds. Some of the essays were written as early as 1995. What role does race and

identity play in your story telling? CP: Questions of identity have always played a large part in my thinking and writing; and, of course, race is a key component of identity. Certainly for me, and certainly in Britain. CVR: You were born in the Caribbean, raised in England and have traveled across Europe and America. In what ways did your traveling shape your views and/or understanding of literature? CP: Traveling has helped liberate me from ever being tempted to view literature as a cultural product that is slavishly tied to nation. CVR: Is there a particular place or setting that you find inspiring? CP: I’ve written the final drafts of three or four of my books in Bangkok, Thailand. I’ve always enjoyed writing in Thailand. CVR: In the essay “Fire,” in Color Me English, you state that “ ‘How do I write?’ That is a tricky question.” How so? CP: Well, I’m not sure where the characters come from. I’ve a reasonable notion of the source of the ideas, but fusing ideas and characters, and making everything cohere into being with the appropriate language is a process that still seems somewhat mysterious to me. ‘How do I write?’ I’m still not always sure. CVR: The complexities of self-exploration are themes in much of your fiction, what draws you to that subject for some of your protagonists to deal with? What draws you to it as a narrative for a story? CP: Well, good writing is, as Eudora Welty once said, “Daring to do with one’s bag of fears.” Self-exploration

is the beginning of understanding. CVR: When I read some of your stories, I think how I’m still uncovering aspects of my life. Do you believe that selfexploration and self-discovery are ongoing processes that many of us engage in, some aware of it, some not, and that sometimes reading about it helps us along the way? CP: I think if we’re living properly we’ll be forever always uncovering aspects of our lives, and selves, which will be surprising. CVR: In a Harper’s Magazine essay, popular novelist Jonathan Franzen once asked: “Was fiction about mastering the sweep of the culture in an innovative way, or was it about telling a more intimate story and delivering reading pleasure?” In your opinion, what would you say constitutes an absorbing story? CP: Engagement with character that is rendered in language that has been polished by attention. The two things that I appreciate in good fiction are first, being introduced to characters whose lives I care about. People who I want to understand, and perhaps even get to know. I suppose it’s an old-fashioned conceit of literature in a world in which people are experimenting with all kinds of narrative positions, but I’m apologetically old-school in this sense. I also love graceful language. Not purple, or overly poetic, but language that suggests the author has taken the time to choose the right word. CVR: Who are some of your literary heroes? CP: I admire many writers: James Baldwin, Jean Rhys, Ryszard Kapuscinski, C. P. Cavafy, Pico Iyer, Henrik Ibsen… an eclectic list. CVR: Can you choose one or two of those authors? What is it that you enjoy about their writing?

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CP: James Baldwin—determination. Jean Rhys—courage. CVR: Can you explain a little further? For instance, how is Baldwin’s determination reflected in his writing, or displayed in what works specifically? CP: Truthfully, there are many things I could say about Baldwin. (I think the essays about him in A New World Order and Color Me English say it best). But basically, he was the first writer I really knew and I got to know him very well. I was able to see how he dealt with disappointments from publishers, how he remained focused on work, and even when things were not always working out for him, he never embraced despair. I love his ability to move seamlessly between the essay and fiction, and admired his reluctance to shy away from a difficult or controversial subject. CVR: What do you consider is the duty of a writer. Is it to change a reader’s perception about a person or situation, or perhaps make a political or social statement? CP: A writer often wants to change a reader’s perception about the world, which is a political act. But we have to work through character, so helping the reader to feel close to fictional characters is the gate through which we have to usher the reader. I am one of those writers who hopes to use character as a way of introducing the reader to a new way of thinking about the world. CVR: Do you see any differences between the book publishing industry and the reading audiences in the United States and in Europe? CP: Not really. Publishing is an industry in huge flux and transition. The reading public is being encouraged to “consume” quickly on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m not sure what effect this will eventually have on writing. CVR: What are your thoughts about today’s publishing industry and the future of printed books?

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CP: I think there will be fewer printed books, and more reading on digital equipment. Books will move with increasing swiftness from an author’s desk to the reading public. What this will mean for the role of editors and editing, I’m not sure. CVR: Do you own an e-reader of any kind and what’s loaded on it? CP: I don’t own an e-reader, or an iPhone, or a BlackBerry. Maybe that will change, but I’m comfortable without these gadgets at present. CVR: What are some of your passions? CP: I used to run marathons, before rupturing my Achilles tendon. I also used to climb mountains. I’ve been up Mount Kilimanjaro four times. These days, I’m a little more sedate. I play golf and I watch a lot of English soccer on TV. CVR: There are plenty of books published these days, whether in print or as an e-book. What are your thoughts about the current state of literature created by Black American, African or Caribbean authors, writers from the African Diaspora? CP: I think the state of literature by African, African-American, and African-diasporan writers is as healthy as it’s ever been. We are privileged to have the generation of Morrison, Achebe, Lamming, Walcott, Soyinka, Ngugi, alive and working, and a newer generation behind them who are also working and producing works of excellence; writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Colson Whitehead. I’m optimistic about what is going on. CVR: Caryl, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. All the best to you. CP: And to you! H

T EXCERP

Copyright © 2011 by Caryl Phillips. This excerpt originally appeared in Color Me English: Migration and Belonging Before and After 9/11, published by The New Press, www.thenewpress.com. Reprinted here with permission.

As a boy growing up in England, I knew that the main factor preventing my full participation in British life was the color of my skin. If only they could somehow color me English – in other words, white – then nobody would know the difference. The truth is, I did not want to be white, I just wanted to fit in, and I believed that color was the issue. And then slowly things began to change. In November 1978, Viv Anderson, the Nottingham Forest fullback, became the first black footballer to play for England. Within a few years there were black players on most of the first -division football teams, and then there were other black faces in the English national team; soon after there were many black athletes on the Olympic track and field team, and black people on television reading the news. We were coloring England, and although problems remained one sensed gates being unlocked, rusty bolts being drawn back, and barriers being frequently crossed. However, the shock that most people felt on the morning of 7 July 2005, when it became clear that four non-white Britons had killed themselves and others, was a timely reminder that it is foolhardy to think that race by itself is a barometer of either human disaffection or social progress. It is a factor, but equity of opportunity, especially in housing, education and employment, is determined by race and class and gender; and then there is something else. This is what my young Muslim ‘friend’ Ali knew when we stood outside the school office. I had escorted him there in some kind of gesture of racial – outsider – solidarity, but he was culturally an outsider in a way that I never could be. Back then, I thought that Britain was narrating a harsh tale to me about who I was; however, I had no idea how caustic the narrative was that Ali was being forced to listen to. I was constantly being told, ‘Go back to where you come from’, but in reality I had no

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where to go back to. Some among my generation did grow dread locks and try to retreat into a strangely essential black identity, and they began to speak of Africa as ‘home’, but I knew that we were not going anywhere and that we would have to wrestle with Britain to make their story fit our lives. That’s what all migrants do, as their plural selves develop and concessions are made to the new nation while they decide, as time moves on, which of their cultural traditions to hold onto and which they can discard without brutalizing who they are. In other words, immigrants decide how, and at what pace, they will adapt. As England was coloring itself, Ali and his family were obviously hearing the same instructions that I was subjected to regarding England’s desire that we should all go back to where we came from, but Ali did have some essential place of identity to which he could, should he wish to, turn as an alternative to the perceived hostility of British life. On that July morning in 2005, four young British men felt it necessary to reach out and embrace an alternative place by seizing up on an extreme form of Islamic political identity and demonstrating its potency with tragic consequences. In order to prevent this happening again it is absolutely crucial that we think long and hard about what is happening in Europe. The coloring of Britain, and Europe, suggests a radical and permanent change in the appearance of the European continent that is as dramatic as the changes that came with the post-Columbian settlement of the Americas, or the European settlement of Australasia. To imagine that one can successfully legislate the pace of this change is to fundamentally misunderstand the human desire to belong, and to dangerously misjudge the human capacity to feel slighted. There are those who are willing to pay the highest price imaginable to resist people who would

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police their identities. And there are those who will pay the highest price imaginable to secure an identity. The European response needs to be significantly more sophisticated than merely telling people that their traditions are barbaric and that they must dress differently. European borders are porous. European nations have been built, have grown, and have been developed by countless waves of people entering countries and slowly learning the language, adapting to the customs, and enriching the national life by eventually beginning to consider themselves English, or Dutch, or French, or Belgian. In recent years, this process has been complicated and made more difficult by issues of race. How does one have a black face and be European? This has been one of the great essay questions of my life, and it continues to be a vexing issue at the heart of Europe, but I am an optimist. Despite the statement by Georges Frêche – a French socialist politician who recently claimed that he is ashamed because, according to him, the French football team does not represent France because there are too many black faces – I remain convinced that this coloring of Europe, so that one can be both black and European, is not something that might happen; it has already happened. However, what if your blackness or brownness comes with a different set of cultural traditions? This is where we now seem to be, and on both sides of the fence the stand-off is filled with violence and distrust. Does it make sense to single out one group and berate them with scant regard for any nuances of difference among them, and then panic in to legislating against them? Is this going to help smooth the transition in Europe? I think the so-called radicalizing of the man who killed Theo van Gogh, and the radicalizing of the suicide bombers on 7 July in London gives us some part of the answer. Of course, vigorously rooting out those

who seek to commit random acts of violence against innocent people going about their daily business is part of our social contract. In Britain, we learned just how deadly and destructive this violence can be during the IRA bombing campaign in the 1970’s and ‘80s. But we also learned that being dogmatic, and passing restrictive legislation, and not understanding our own history, only slows down the movement towards peace and our ability to both tolerate, and cherish, diversity in all its manifestations. On the morning of 7 July 2005 when I realized that three of the four suicide bombers were from Leeds my heart sank. They were people with Yorkshire accents, exactly like the people I had grown up with. Just what had gone wrong with these young British lives? And, of course, I thought of Ali. I thought of his face as his colleagues threw his books out of the bus window; I thought of his silent, dignified hurt. I felt guilty that, over the years, I had made little effort to try to imagine how it felt to be both British and a Muslim, and I had never stopped to consider how it felt to be called a ‘Paki’ every day. I was safe in my world where I could wait for colored footballers, and musicians, and newscasters to emerge and ease my passage in to the outer circle of belonging in a still defensive and racist Britain. However, at least for me, the journey was beginning. I was being colored English, as opposed to my thirteen-year-old classmate, Ali. The truth is, Ali’s journey had begun from afar more peripheral place than mine, and clearly the pace of his journey would be glacial compared with my own meanderings. In the years that have passed, both of us have witnessed significant changes in English life; for instance, legislation has been put in to place which outlaws the use of racist language in public discourse, but those on the

right have simply replaced their ‘Paki-bashing’ discourse with an anti-Muslim rhetoric delivered with a wink and a nudge for they know full well that they are still targeting non-white people. Nominally, at least, I am not affected by such anti-Muslim rhetoric, but Ali and his family remain in the frontline of attack, and this being the case I am not sure how much real progress has been made. I often wonder what happened to Ali, and if he ever did complete the journey or if, like the three young Muslims from Leeds, the effort of trying to belong, and the pain of moving slowly into England, caused him to suffer from some sort of assimilation fatigue that eventually led him to simply abandon the whole enterprise. Did Ali get fed up with being called ‘Paki’, and with being told that he and his family must dress like English people, not speak their own language, knock it off with that mosque prayer stuff, and stop cooking their smelly food? Back then, as a thirteen-year-old, I instinctively knew that some part of me was Ali; I knew that in a time of crisis there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’, there is only ‘we’, and all of us must obey the moral directive to communicate with each other. I hope that Ali, unlike the three Leeds Muslims who died on 7 July, has not given up on Britain. I hope that over the years he has learned to cultivate a temporary deafness to the knee-jerk proclamations of various politicians and the bitter hostility of thugs who understand neither what is, nor what is inevitable. Successful integration does mean that immigrants adapt to the new country, but it also means that the new country adapts to them. It demands that the residents cultivate the capacity - and courage - to change their ideas about who they are. For this to work it is not just those who go to the mosque and wear head scarves who have to look at themselves. Those who eat fish and chips and drink beer or wear clogs or continued on page 48

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CAMILLE T.

by L’Oréal Snell 16

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WideVision Photography/Marcia Wilson

DUNGY

Camille T. Dungy is the author of What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison; Suck on the Marrow, for which she received a 2011 American Book Award; and Smith Blue. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA 2007 Literary Award. Always a fan of her poetry, when Mosaic gave me the opportunity to ask Camille a few questions I moved fast. L’Oréal Snell: There are several poems that I really enjoyed, but I am curious as to story behind the title of the book, Smith Blue and the linking to the poem, “The Blue.” Camille T. Dungy: The whole poem is about the fragility of life and love and our connections to what might be seen to be permanent, but are fleeting. That became the place out of which I got the title for the whole book, because the book itself is about the fleetingness of our sense of security, of our love, of the land that we live on and we are or are not caring for, the people that we live with and who we are or are not caring for. That fragility and security that I talk about in the poem, “The Blue,” is the basis of the book entirely. LS: One of my favorite poems from Smith Blue, “Maybe Tuesday Will Be My Good News Day,” has a read on a lyrical beat. I found myself snapping with each line and could hear symbols and how fluid the poem scatted line by line. Was there any intention to evoke a blues beat for the poem’s rhythm? CTD: In terms of the music, the poem is based on the jazz song, “The Man I Love.” I was inspired partly by a jazz standard as I was writing it. Smith Blue looks at the blues themselves, a musical formed in a time of economic, racial, and cultural struggles and hardships and the pressures acting on the musicians that evoked sadness and despair, but also joy, hope and coping. We have figured out ways to smith the blues, to make blues. We make hardship and we add what makes the world harder, but have also figured out how to add ways to make the world better which is the making of the song in “Maybe Tuesday Will Be My Good News Day.” LS: What is the connection between your poems and your upbringing? CTD: I grew up surrounded by outdoor space and the ability to move around in it. I started to realize that my way of

interpreting the world and its history was directly linked to my understanding about the way we treat the nonhuman world and how it has been used for and against us. Or with and against us. I also began to really pay attention and discovered a historical landscape where I lived at the time and how it was linked together. I then started writing in that way and joined a community of people who are writing and thinking in this way. I began to notice a major absence of direct conversation about Black people who wrote about nature. I knew that they were out there, because I read work by them and I was talking to them, but they weren’t in anthologies, so that major omission seemed to be something that needed to be corrected. LS: How similar or different was the writing process and constructing of Suck on the Marrow and Smith Blue? CTD: Both books were different production processes. Suck on the Marrow is sectioned into chapters and narratives, Smith Blue is basically one big chunk of poems and the arc is more thematic than plot-driven. Suck on the Marrow was the result of years of research, and the narratives are entirely made up as a result. It’s my invention, though people have asked me questions about the characters that suggest they think they are real. I’m glad that people feel like they can go to the stacks and research these narratives. Smith Blue is constructed in an entirely different way from my first two books. A great number of poems that were written for this book were constructed when I was in that “tractor pull” of writing everything --Suck on the Marrow, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. I put them to bed and I spent a summer working on my writing project. I just took all of the poems that I had from the past 10 years and spread them out all over the study and started to realize that I had a connection in a lot of these poems that I had not been consciously thinking of when I wrote them. Again, there was that thematic arc. Eventually, I was able fill in the gaps to make Smith Blue a cohesive product. In both books, it’s the landscape of history that is compelling to me and is a rich territory that is of particular interest to me. H

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Maybe Tuesday Will Be My Good News Day Fireflies flaring flatted fifths: I’m tuning up on the picket fence: one moment an empty bell, one moment a rubber mute. I’ve practiced so I know what comes next. The night offers this much and not an F more: one then one then two. Belfry bats could be blowing bebop for all I care (asymmetry is obsolete…gone. Gone. Gone, gone.) Fire in the fire pit, the smoke catches in his hair. The rest of the boys go on without me though if I wanted to chase them I could breathe clear from the base of my belly and blow. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds, nor are those cats in the alley skatting. I’m all tuned up and off the fence. His solo is over and I’ve practiced so I know what comes next: One/Then one/Then two. It’s that simple.

Camille T. Dungy

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The Blue One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it in danger as well— but now they’re logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses’ shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni’s boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It’s years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile. ~ If his daughter spooled out the fabric she’s chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright-hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land’s scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan’s Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean a mile or so off anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling, “This is it. Here! This is it!” his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive. ~ In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith’s Blue.

MosaicMagazine.org Camille T. Dungy

LESSON S N A L P FOR

S R O T A C U D E L ITERARY

MAGAZINE

Fall 2012 MosaicMagazine.org Mosaicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lesson plans give high-school educators ways to connect literature to history and social studies while also serving to increase the importance of books and reading. Designed by Eisa Nefertari Ulen

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Theme One

Everyday Women in an Extraordinary Movement Narrative:

One Crazy Summer, Rita Williams-Garcia Topics for Discussion: 1. The mother in One Crazy Summer abandons her children for several reasons. One reason is her need to write poetry. Instead of dedicating her Oakland kitchen to the domestic arts that are traditionally associated with motherhood, like cooking, she uses it as a creative space, a place for literary art. What do you think the kitchen symbolizes in this book? 2. Delphine’s grandmother, Big Ma, teaches Delphine how to do the work traditionally associated with women, especially with women who are wives and mothers. Delphine’s mother, Cecile, tells the girls to get free breakfasts at the Black Panther Center in the morning and buy Chinese food for dinner. Which woman is the best role model for Delphine? 3. On page 110, Cecile tells Delphine, “We’re trying to break yokes. You’re trying to make one for yourself.” What do you think Cecile means? What, exactly, is a yoke? What kind of animal wears a yoke, and what kind of work is generally associated with that animal? 4. On page 110, Cecile tells Delphine, “It wouldn’t kill you to be selfish.” What do you think Cecile means? What does caring for and worrying about everyone in her family do to Cecile? Would Cecile be freer, or more alive, if she cared about herself more? 5. On page 106, Cecile says, “I’d never made a mess in my life. Not even for the fun of it.” Can boys get away with making messes more than girls? Are girls more likely to be expected to clean up their messes than boys? Do you think all kids should be able to make messes every once in a while just for the fun of it? Why or why not? Do you think the fact that Cecile is standing in the kitchen when she says this line is symbolic? 6. Why do you think Cecile is so reluctant to ride Hirohito Woods’ go-kart? When she finally does ride it, on page 191, Cecile says that she has “the time of my life, flying down that glorious hill.” What do you think Cecile’s ride on the go-kart symbolizes? Essay Idea: Think about someone (a relative, friend, or acquaintance) you wish you could see more often. Who is this person, and how do you know her or him? When did you meet this person, and what was your time together like? How did this person make you feel? What would you do if you could spend more time with this person? Where would you go with her or him? What would you talk about? Write about the person you miss, the per-

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son you wish was closer to you. Additional Activities: 1. On page 110, Cecile tells Delphine she shouldn’t be so “quick to pull the plow.” What animal pulls plows? Read chapter 2 of Their Eyes Were Watching God and note where Nanny tells Janie that the Black woman is “the mule of the world.” In a small group, talk about what you think both Nanny and Cecile mean. Take notes while you talk. Remember that Nanny was talking to Janie in the early 1900s, and Cecile talks to Delphine in the mid-1900s. We live in the early 21st century. What things have remained the same for Black women? What things have changed? Is the Black woman still “the mule of the world,” or are African American women free? What about women like First Lady Michelle Obama and billionaire Oprah Winfrey? How are they different from Janie and Delphine? How are they the same? What about women like the ones in your families? Present the content of your small group discussion to the entire class. 2. With your group, draw a line down the middle of a piece of poster board. On one side write “Yoked like Mules” and on the other write “Free.” Cut pictures of Black women from popular magazines, and put the images you select on one side or the other. Where do women in business suits belong? What about Black women in revealing clothing and provocative poses? What does your group decide: Are most African American women today “yoked” like “mules,” or are most Black women free? 3. Fern reveals the truth about Crazy Kelvin when she performs her poem in front of more than 1,000 Oakland residents. How does the community respond to her poem? How does Crazy Kelvin respond? Why is it important that the entire community hear Fern read her poem? What might have been different if Fern had simply told Delphine or an adult in the Black Panther Party that she saw the police pat Kelvin on the back? Think about your own neighborhood. What truth do you think your community needs to know? Is there something that you and maybe other younger people know about your community that the adults don’t know? Maybe there’s an intersection that’s too dangerous for young people to cross. Maybe there’s some play equipment in the community playground that needs repair. Alone or in a small group, write a poem, a short play or skit, or a short story that communicates your important truth. Share it with your class. 4. Crazy Kelvin works for the Federal government as part of COINTELPRO. Research CONITELPRO, the FBI, and J Edgar Hoover’s plan to “eliminate a Black Messiah.” Are you surprised to learn about the government surveillance that took place in the 1960s? How does the government surveil or watch citizens today? Should government surveillance be in place today because of the 9-11 attacks? Have a debate to discuss the issue. Create one team in favor of government surveillance, and another that opposes programs like COINTELPRO. 5. Why do you think Kelvin is crazy? What do you think it must be like for him to pretend to be a Black Panther when he really works for the government? Were you surprised to find out about his relationship with the police when you read Williams-Garcia’s book? Write a poem using Crazy Kelvin’s voice as the speaker of the poem. Express Crazy Kelvin’s experience, from what you believe to be his point-of-view.

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6. Jabari Asim’s book, A Taste of Honey, is also set during the Black Power Era and told from the point-of-view of young people growing up during the 1960s. Read an editorial review of Asim’s book. What does the review tell you about Asim’s collection of short stories? How is the review different from a book report? Write your own editorial review of Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer. 7. Research the Black Panther Party, specifically the work that Panthers did with children and young adults. Were the schools and breakfast programs you found in your research like the ones described in WilliamsGarcia’s book? In the chapter “Coloring and La-La,” the female protagonist, Delphine, begins to realize that the Black Panther Party “wasn’t at all the way the television showed militants.” Delphine’s opinion changes as she experiences the organization’s free breakfasts, summer school, and other community empowerment work. Form a small group and, using your research to guide you, write a play that dramatizes the real-life experiences young people had within the Black Panther Party. 8. Read either Attica Locke’s novel Dark Water Rising, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir The Beautiful Struggle, or Eisa Ulen’s essay, “Letter to Angela Davis.” You may also want to view scenes from Eisa Davis’ play Angela’s MixTape online. What has been the legacy of the Black Power Struggle for these daughters and sons of 1960s – 1970s activists? What has the struggle to liberate all Black people done to the individuals who risked their lives in The Movement? Write your own response to their work, either fiction, non-fiction, drama, or poetry, and share your work with the class. Supplemental Reading Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Jabari Asim, A Taste of Honey Attica Locke, Dark Water Rising Eisa Davis, Angela’s MixTape Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle Eisa Ulen, “Letter to Angela Davis” Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men: Black Women’s Studies

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Theme Two

Bodies in Prison, Minds Set Free Narrative:

Lockdown, Walter Dean Meyers Topics for Discussion: 1. Reese, the male protagonist in Lockdown, is young, Black, and incarcerated. Why was the story of this teenager’s experience in a juvenile detention facility so important to tell? Why should anyone care about the lives of young men like Reese? 2. In chapter 18, Nancy Opara tells Reese that he looks like he is Hausa. Mr. Hooft jokingly tells Reese to “Tell her you’re an American!” But, later in the same chapter, Mr. Hooft says: “You know your name. You look in the mirror and you see your face, your eyes staring back at you, but what does it all mean? Are you a man? One time a man was somebody strong and big, but who are you when you are not strong anymore? Not big anymore?” Hooft is thinking about himself here, but could he also be reflecting on emerging men like Reese? Is part of Reese’s problem the problem of identity? Is his struggle to come-of-age compounded by his invisibility, his erasure from the world outside the Progress detention facility? 3. War is an important theme in Lockdown, as Mr. Hooft tells Reese of his memories of detention in a children’s camp during World War II, and Toon gives Reese a copy of Lord of the Flies to thank him for coming to his rescue during a fight at Progress. Do you think the chaos of life as Reese remembers it on the streets of Harlem is like the chaos of war? Is the world inside Progress often like the deserted island in William Golding’s novel? 4. What gift does Mr. Hooft leave Reese? What do you think his gift symbolizes? 5. What do you think of the name of the detention facility where Reese is held? Do you think Meyer’s use of the name Progress is ironic? What might the name symbolize? Does Reese make any progress while he is in detention? If you think Reese does progress, is it because of his experiences at Progress – or in spite of them? 6. Consider setting in Meyers’ novel. The book takes place at the detention facility and the nursing home. In what way(s) are these settings similar? In what way(s) are they different? Is Mr. Hooft as trapped at the nursing home as Reese is at Progress? Is either of these two characters ever free? Look through the book and find the places where windows are important to the character, either Reese or Mr. Hooft. Think about what windows might symbolize for each character. 7. Think about Reese’s and Mr. Hooft’s relationships with their families. In what way(s) are Reese’s conversations with his sister and mother similar to Mr. Hooft’s conversations with his son? In what way(s) are they different?

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8. Reese seems to accept his punishment at Progress. Do you think the punishment he receives there fits his crime? Should he be housed in a detention facility for what he did? 9. The jailers at Progress are tough on the kids incarcerated there. Do you think the tough approach they take with the young men helps rehabilitate them, or do you think their methods to maintain control make the young men feel – and act – more like criminals? Essay Idea: Reese makes a few bad decisions that land him in Progress. Reese had a plan for the crime he committed, but his plans failed, and he was caught and imprisoned. Do you think Reese’s life might have been different if he had an action plan for college instead of an action plan for crime? Think about your own life. Do you have an action plan for life after high school? Do you plan to go to college, attend graduate school, get a professional degree, or obtain a Ph.D.? Research the different kids of degree programs that are available in this country. Figure out what the MFA, JD, and MD degrees are. Think about your own interests; you can get a degree in just about anything you want. Once you think about your interests and the kinds of degrees you can work toward to credential yourself in a field that is of interest to you, write your own action plan. What do you want to become? Which colleges offer the degree programs that match your career goals? How long would you have to be in school? Where would the money for school come from? Make a plan. How will you actualize your vision of your future self? Additional Activities: 1. Think about the crimes each incarcerated boy in Progress committed. Why do you think those boys broke the law? What motivated their crimes? Think about your own community. How do we keep young people out of facilities like Progress? In a small group, write an action plan for the community where you live. What needs to happen in your neighborhood to help young people go to college instead of to jail? Share your action plan with the class. 2. Look up the words invisibility, disappearance, marginalized, and passing. On a poster board, make four equal spaces and write one of the four words in each space. Use quotes, scenes, and symbols from the book to fill the space around each word and express Reese’s relationship to the world around him. For example, consider the way Reese slumps in a corner chair in Mr. Hooft’s room. Is Reese trying to disappear? Is he invisible? Think about Reese’s relationship with his father and decide if his father should go in the space labeled disappearance. Does Reese’s mother try to marginalize him even further when she visits him at Progress? 3. Read Sofia Quintero’s book, Efrain’s Secret. Her male protagonist and title character also makes decisions – some very bad ones – that land him in trouble. How is he similar to Reese? In what ways are Efrain and Reese different? Write your own short story where a male character makes a decision that gets him in trouble or takes him down the wrong path. As the author, you must decide whether your character will remain in a cycle of

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trouble and bad choices, or if he will find his way out of the dilemma he puts himself in. 4. Research the statistics on crime in the community where you live. What are the top five types of crimes committed there and how frequently do these crimes take place every year? Then research the same types of crimes in a community that is geographically close to your own but vastly different in terms of housing costs. (In other words, if the property values in your neighborhood are middle or high, research a nearby community where the housing prices are low.) How often do those same top 5 crimes occur in the other neighborhood? What factors do you think might contribute to any similarities or differences in terms of crime rates in the two communities you research? Make a pie graph to illustrate the crime rates in each neighborhood. Make a bar graph to illustrate the property values, the two different median housing prices, in each community. Finally, research high school graduation rates in each community, and make a bar graph to illustrate those statistics, too. Share the results of your research with the class and discuss your findings. Based on your research, what might life be like for young men in each of the two neighborhoods? 5. Break into groups. In one group, write a one-act play that is set in your neighborhood. Another group should write a one-act play set in the other community you’ve researched. Take a week to revise the play and rehearse it as a group. After a week of rehearsals during class time, come prepared to do a staged reading of your play. In a staged reading, the play isn’t really acted out. Each person in your group should be one character, and you can sit on chairs in front of the class. Each person must read her or his lines so that the rest of the class can hear your play as it would be performed by actors on a stage. 6. Research the real life case of Edmund Perry, a 17-year old boarding school student who was shot and killed by a plainclothes policeman. Find as many newspaper and magazine accounts of the 1985 incident that you can. What choices do you think Edmund made? What choices did the plainclothes officer make? How much of this incident seems to be about choice? How much of it is about circumstances beyond Edmund’s control? Write your own op-ed article about Edmund Perry that expresses your perspective of the tragedy.

Supplemental Reading: Asha Bandele, The Prisoner’s Wife Sofia Quintero, Efrain’s Secret Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Jawanza Kunjufu, Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys Sister Souljah, The Coldest Winter Ever Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

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Theme Three

Hurricane Katrina’s Criminals Narrative

Dark Rain, Mat Johnson Topics for Discussion: 1. Reread the pages that begin with Wednesday, August 31, 2005, where Emmit’s cousin Flash and Flash’s friend call the young men at the Superdome “animals” and say “it’s like ‘Planet of the Apes’ out here.” What happens when one of the young men Flash and his friend are talking about approaches them? What makes Flash call the same young man “a true American”? What do you think of this scene? Why does illustrator Simon Gane draw the people who offer the bag of supplies as young men wearing t-shirts and with braids, baseball caps, and wave caps? Flash and his friend have certain expectations when they look at the young men; what were your expectations when you started to read this scene? In what ways is this scene important to the overall story? 2. Think about what other characters wear in this graphic novel. Are the characters who wear military uniforms heroes or criminals? Are the characters in street clothes thugs or victims? What are the author and illustrator saying about stereotypes and the way preconceived misconceptions shaped the real life events that took place in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? 3. The author made the decision to make Sarah, the woman Dabny rescues, pregnant. Why do you think he did that? What are the stereotypes people have about pregnant women? What are the stereotypes people have about young, low-income, African American pregnant women who aren’t married? 4. Consider the way Sarah gets from the attic to the roof during the storm. What does this scene tell the reader about Sarah’s character? 5. Do you think Sarah is strong enough to take care of herself? In what way(s) does Dabny make Sarah even stronger? In what way(s) does Sarah make Dabny stronger? Dabny uses a boat to save Sarah in the beginning of the story; in what way(s) does Sarah save Dabny? Think about the family in the boat at the end of the story. Who – and what – has been rescued? 6. Think about the scene at the checkpoint leading into New Orleans. Dabny saves a young boy named Eli from a burning car. Why is this scene important? What does this scene tell the reader about Dabny’s character? 7. Dabny served under Driggs in Iraq, where Dabny witnesses Driggs’ slaughter of innocent men who were Continued on page 45

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REVIEW

“This is only a preliminary warning,” is how Etienne Lero opened his 1932 “Legitime Defense Manifesto” for the publication bearing the same name. And since that declaration, black surrealism has been a clarion call for the some, while a cause for alarm for many others.

Black, Brown, & Beige Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (The Surrealist Revolution) Franklin Rosemont (Editor), Robin D.G. Kelley (Editor) University of Texas Press Review by D. Scot Miller

The Legitime Defense, a limited-run, red and black journal, was put together by a twenty-something Lero – then a Martinique student in Paris – and his black and brown expatriate comrades. The group of free-thinkers and radicals had all rejected the “either/or” of burgeoning Marxist politics for the “both/and” of surrealism. For them, it was about poetry and politics, social and cultural revolution; only the double-consciousness en extremis would do. Lero opined in his manifesto, “…it is only by horribly gritting our teeth that we are able to endure the abominable system of constraints and restrictions, the extermination of love and the limitation of dream, generally known by the name of western civilization.” The journal was banned in Martinique immediately. But it is from this small group of radical artists and theorists, and the first small book they produced eighty years ago, that Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelley use as the platform for Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and Diaspora (University of Texas Press), the most comprehensive anthology of the afrosurreal to date. As pointed out in Rosemont’s introduction, unlike many of the established arts movements, the French surrealists embraced their black and brown counterparts from the start, “Rejecting all forms of domination and the dichotomous ideologies that go with them,” He says, – intolerance, exploitation, bigotry, exclusiveness, white supremacy, and all race prejudice – surrealists make the

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resolution of contradictions a high priority.” It has only been the art historians and academics who have expurgated and white-washed them from this marvelous lineage. Rosemont calls them “The Invisible Surrealists”, and invisibility, as a concept, is so prevalent within this anthology - and in afrosurreal practice - that it has become a tenet in the contemporary version of the movement. What Black, Brown and Beige does, through an exhaustive compilation of poetry and prose spanning over continents, decades, and other movements; is not so much re-write a history, as reclaim it. “Surrealism,” Rosemont says, “ – an open realism – signifies more reality and an expanded awareness of reality, including aspects and elements of the real that are ordinarily overlooked, dismissed, excluded, hidden, shunned, suppressed, ignored, forgotten or otherwise neglected.” Though the journey is far from easy - the road as fraught with as many phantoms as a Toni Morrison novel, with maps and documents buried in oblivion - the book serves as skeletal remains resurrecting themselves upon each new discovery. Like Simone Yoyotte, the first black woman surrealist. Born in Martinique, dying in Paris at the age of twenty two, whose small, but powerful contributions to Legitime Defense, the Paris Surrealist Group, and the journal Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution, show glimmers of genius and surreal genesis as one of the early proponents of the automatic writing technique and expression of an unapologetic black aesthetic. Her poem “PyjamaSpeed,” written with this technique, evokes luxury, terror, and homeland in only a few esoteric lines: “My

pyjamas gilt and embroidered/with myself (spear) and worst of all gilt with azure/my pyjamas balsam hammer gilt with azure…” Beginning in Martinique (“One of the vital centers of the surrealist universe,” according to Rosemont.) with Lero and Aime Cesaire, the Invisible Surrealists move on to Jamaica with Claude McKay, to Cuba with long-forgotten provocateurs Juan Brea and Mary Low, and further still to Trinidad with C.L.R James, it becomes clear within the first fifty pages that Black surrealists have been a driving force in not only the works of Fanon and Damas, but Breton, Bataille, and Artaud as well. Nowhere is this more evident than when Suzanne and Aime Cesaire and Rene Menil of Legitime Defense began publishing Tropiques from and about their homeland during the mass suppression of the arts in Europe during World War II. As French surrealists like Breton exiled themselves in Martinique, Cuban surrealists Wifredo Lam, Brea and Low also converged, seeing the island as both a refuge and retreat for their art. The influence of black surrealism on the surrealist movement was so indelible that Rosemont says that “As Tropiques became more surrealist, surrealism in effect became more black.” Though much has been written and said about artist/activist/statesmen Aime Cesaire, much more needs to written about Suzanne, a brilliant surrealist thinker, and mother of the afrosurreal aesthetic. Her quest for “The Marvelous”, more than her partner, inspired the Tropiques surrealist group, and especially Rene Menil. “The true task of mankind consists solely in the attempt

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to bring the marvelous into real life,” Menil says in “Introduction to the Marvelous”, “so that life can become more encompassing. So long as the mythic imagination is not able to overcome each and every boring mediocrity, human life will amount to nothing but useless, dull experiences, just killing time, as they say.” As the surrealist fervor ran (dripped?) into Haiti, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Guyana, Columbia and Egypt, luminaries brought their own local flavor to an increasingly brown and black arts movement with a greater spiritual and action-oriented base. In Guyana, we find Leon-Gontran Damas, a contemporary of Aime Cesaire and co-editor of the famous negritude journal L’Etudiant Noir. “If I have become the man that I am,” Damas said in 1973, “I owe it to surrealism.” And the debt appears to be reciprocal. With just the small sample provided in the anthology, one can see how his cadence and content influenced the Black Power and Black Arts movements: “For sure I’ll be fed up/without even waiting/for things to ripen/ like a good camembert/ So until then I’ll just go/and put my foot in it/or grab by the collar/everything I can’t stand/In capital letters:/ colonization/civilization/assimilation/and all that.” What is particularly interesting about Black, Brown and Beige’s surrealist chronology is what happens when the movement reaches the United States, where Richard Wright can be named the first serious American Surrealist, and first black American surrealist. Rosemont notes that after Wright attended an immense exhibition called “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism” in 1937 that he “recognized surrealism as revolutionary method of learning, a means of resolving immobilizing contradictions, a way of seeing things whole and thereby changing the world.” While the mainstream American Arts and Let-

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ters community of the time (Decidedly pro-fascist, procapitalist and staunchly conservative.) rejected surrealism, it was the African American writers and artists who whole-heartedly embraced it, modified it, and made it their own. Beginning with Richard Wright, Zora Neal Hurston, and Ralph Ellison, the seeds of American Surrealism is Black American Surrealism (The AfroSurreal). “In contrast to the organizers of most surrealist groups in Europe and South America,” says Rosemont at the beginning of the chapter, “The 1950s Surrealist Underground in the United States”, “these U.S. guerilla poets were of impeccable working class background. Both of them, moreover were black…Yes, the 1950’s surrealist underground in the United States was started by an informal committee of two.” The 1950s can easily be categorized as the second most anti-surrealist period in American history (This writer believes we are living in the first.), and Ted Joans in New York and Bob Kaufman in San Francisco stand as the only American surrealists of the decade and slightly beyond it. This is important because the tenor and shade of surrealist expression irrevocably changed through the inextricable linking of jazz, surrealism, and black American expression, primarily through literature and poetry. Along with the emerging Beat Movement (Of which Joans and Leroy Jones (Amiri Baraka) were initial members), black radical imagination – always an inspiration to the surrealists – came to the forefront and began to write itself into the pantheon. To Joans, surrealism was more than a way to write a poem or paint a picture, but a way of life that not only demanded “complete freedom of the imagination and radical social change, but also a farreaching moral revolution.”

Joans’ sentiments can be placed directly alongside Kaufman’s unequivocal affirmation, “I acknowledge the demands of surrealist realization.” His 1959 Abomunist Manifesto, published by City Lights in 1959, still bears the wit and danger it held over fifty years ago. Kaufman was an activist and poet deeply involved in the struggle for worker’s rights, civil rights, free-speech, and equally against white supremacy, war, the death penalty, and nuclear weapons. Quoting David Henderson, quoting Jerry Stoll, “It was really clear that people like Ginsberg and the rest of them, when they were political activist, were following Kaufman. They didn’t lead Kaufman, he led them.” It is also in this chapter where Rosemont acknowledges the cause for the invisibility that likely kept Joans and Kaufman out of the annals of not only surrealist history, but the history of American Arts and Letters: Jealousy. Celebrated as “The Black Rimbaud” in France, Kaufman was overlooked for both “The San Francisco Renaissance” issue of Evergreen Review and The New American Poets anthology of 1960. Rosemont says, “Such omissions cannot be considered innocent oversights. After all, what is most important about Kaufman is the fact that he was the author of some of the most beautiful, playful, and effective poetry of the last four hundred years.”

movements found homes all over the globe. In 1974, San Francisco’s City Lights published the seminal City Lights Anthology: Surrealism in the United States, featuring the writings of Ed Bullins, Huey Newton, and a tribute to Bob Kaufman, marking the beginning of new interest in the old form. The late Franklin Rosemont, co-founder (Along with his wife, Penelope) of the world-renowned Chicago Surrealist group and historian/theorist Robin D.G. Kelly show a profound sense of both surrealist scholarship and history, but more than that, they both have an understanding of surrealism and afrosurreal as points of praxis and way of life. In the afterword, “Surrealism and the Creation of a Desirable Future,” Robin D.G. Kelley, cites The Zapatistas and Autonomista movements of Argentina, along with Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones as possibilities for an afrosurreal future, while all but rejecting the cold pragmatism of the modern age. “If we cannot articulate our dreams without being accused of being utopian or unrealistic,” he concludes, “then we might as well submit to the current order and open up more soup kitchens.” This is only a preliminary warning…

Self-defense (Legitime Defense, in French) was the key word of the Black Power movement, and afrosurreal writers emerged at the vanguard. Ted Joans points out that Richard Wright coined the term Black Power in 1954, and with the emergence of the Black Arts founder and revolutionary genius, Larry Neal, fire-spitter Jayne Cortez, and mystic-seer, Henry Dumas (for whose work Amiri Baraka coined the term “AfroSurreal Expressionism”); the surrealist-tinged black power and black arts

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REVIEW

Isabel Wilkerson’s first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, couldn’t have come out at a better time for black New Orleanians, who as 2010 statistics confirmed but our own hearts knew lost more than a third of our community in the last decade. As we reassess what we had – good and bad – what we miss and what matters, we may find instruction and solace in this book about a previous era of departures, comparing its lessons to our Diaspora.

The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson Vintage Books Review by Fatima Shaik

Wilkerson, a former bureau chief for the New York Times and now a professor at Boston University, wrote briefly about the evacuees from New Orleans in a 2005 article for that paper and won a Pulitzer for her reporting in 1994 about floods in the Midwest. So she has the credentials and the passion for our confidence in her as a writer. A child of migrants, she has been researching the movement of black people from the South for 15 years and has conducted 1,200 interviews to create her new book. Her dedication and expertise shows. The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautiful book. It opens with a quote from author Richard Wright, “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown…respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.” Wilkerson follows three main characters Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster from their childhoods in Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana, respectively, to Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Their personal portraits are rich, tender and, occasionally shocking – such as the time when Gladney believes that her father was buried alive in a coma because no doctor checked the black deaths in her town. Wilkerson also interweaves other harrowing facts of their lives, for example, that Gladney and Starling

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had to secretly leave their homes because the whites in their rural areas would have used their power to keep blacks as workers, not unlike in the years of slavery. The Warmth of Other Suns takes place from 1915-1970 and contains facts that New Orleanians may have forgotten or may not have experienced, as we were insulated, somewhat, in an urban setting. But Wilkerson points to Monroe, La., to explain why one type of migrant left, exemplified by Robert Foster. Coming from a family of educators, Foster wanted more than his small town offered – a segregated school system and a hospital which didn’t allow black doctors to operate, as well as a white establishment which had specific roles for blacks. Foster leaves to become a surgeon, settling in Los Angles after a long, arduous journey, which Wilkerson describes perfectly – taking him along dark, winding roads in the mountains and arriving at motels which are designated as whites only – not because of the law but because segregation was a fact of life in the West in 1953. After arriving in Los Angeles and working his way to the top of his profession, Foster experiences some high life with his famous patient Ray Charles. Foster goes to Las Vegas, and is among the first blacks to stay in its hotels and use its gambling tables. He comes to live an unapologetic extravagance – in a sprawling mansion surrounded by an elaborate garden. His flashy, lavish life could have never occurred in the South, Wilkerson points out because people with money still needed to be humble and nonthreatening to the white establishment. Wilkerson shows with meticulous writing the distances that the migrants traveled. For example, of Foster’s journey, Wilkerson says “Alone in the car, he had close to two thousand miles of curving road in front of him, fa-

ther than farmworker emigrants leaving Guatemala for Texas.” The distance is also emotional as the book later shows. “He stayed awake at night weighing the options. All this education and no place to practice and live out his life as he imagined it to be.. a citizen of the United States like the passport said.” Many of us may recall the trials of the South in the years of segregation and the frustrations experienced by professional people who could not work to their capability or get the same respect as whites in New Orleans. Segregation, its insults and its threats affected everyone – men who were called boys on their jobs, and people who received less pay for the same work, for example. There were also the obvious stares, muttered curses and measured distances that characterized whites’ relations with us. One redemptive aspect in Wilkerson’s book is her frank explanations of the South and then the North in those years, giving copious footnotes to her research to show that her observations on black life were not constructed simply from her feelings or the feelings of those she interviewed but were backed by newspaper stories of the day and the statistical reports of sociologists and the U.S. government. She began the book “because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it.” To her credit, Wilkerson retraces the steps of the migrants, in one case, driving from Monroe to Los Angeles in a car accompanied by her parents. No one can accuse her of revising history, which is the

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popular charge of people who would like to forget that virulent racism existed. Wilkerson’s book, however, puts racism and its response — the black experience of the Great Migration in perspective. She tells the stories of black migrants in the same way that writers address colonists’ opinion of the American Revolution, the Union’s retelling of the Civil War and the Jewish perspective of World War II. Blacks in her books are not victims of racism alone, but active participants in a major change which affected the United States.

ery fall.

“Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America,” Wilkerson writes. She calls it a “silent pilgrimage” and “perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century.” It was a movement that affected just about every black family in the American South.

The Great Migration changed the demographics of America’s largest cities, making urban centers like Chicago, Detroit, and St Louis and others primarily black. Wilkerson shows that the migrants – against commonlyheld beliefs – did not introduce dysfunctional families. Wilkerson notes that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then in the U.S. Labor Department, said in 1965 that southern migrants brought a “tangle of pathology” to the cities of the North. There was a similar outcry in cities like Atlanta and Houston when they received New Orleanians.

OUR PERSONAL DIASPORA Wilkerson’s lovely book will have resonance for New Orleanians. Surely, all of us know people who left the city in the period of 1915 to the 1970s. We know that they took the trains, buses and drove to the West, Midwest and Northeast, as the author records. My own family left for Chicago and New York in the 1940s and returned. Then again in the 1950s and 1960s, we drove to Ottawa, Canada, every year so that my father could study outside of the United States, my mother could speak French in an integrated setting. They also wanted me to experience life as a carefree child, not one who was constantly on guard. We returned to our family at home in New Orleans ev-

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Now, the 2010 census shows now that approximately one third of New Orleanians left since the year 2000. We probably know these migrants personally. We know who is gone, where they lived, how they were. We have spoken to them on the phone about their journeys. But we are not looking at their journey in retrospect, as in Wilkerson’s book. We are immersed in the impact of their leaving — on the rest of the country and on us.

Wilkerson notes that Moynihan was wrong though. In fact, “the general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants.” They were more likely to work harder, stay married and support their families. But the racism, isolation and overcrowding that greeted them in the Northern cities did eventually create urban poverty, given the large number of people who arrived. This may cause us to reflect on our impact on other cities, which have absorbed New Orleanians. Our criminals may have made the headlines. But our hardworking families and middle class may be living there in anonymity.

Another parallel is that during the early years of the Great Migration, the people who moved north were called immigrants, much as our people were called refugees. Wilkerson notes that the people she interviewed insisted they were never immigrants, even though the South sometimes appeared to be another country. They were born in America. So were the New Orleanians. With regard to Katrina, we should take a lesson from the book to consider the people our city received after the storm. Orleans Parish added about 3,200 Hispanic immigrants between 2000 and 2010. There were more than 33,000 who moved into the seven parish metropolitan area in the same period. Katrina brought workers and now families. Reflecting on the lessons of Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis, we should consider that the way we accommodate the Hispanics now will portend the future of our city too. Something else to consider regarding the Great Migration and our Diaspora is that “Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left,” Wilkerson quotes the sociologist Stewart Tolnay. A fact of New Orleans’ diaspora was that many middle class and upper class blacks left Orleans Parish a while back, first to the East, then after Katrina to other places in Louisiana and the rest of the nation. The census figures show that about 36% of blacks in Orleans left and only about 18% of whites. So is it stating the obvious to say that New Orleans is less welcoming in general to blacks or is that fact not being written? What are people being offered in other places? We know that the people who returned are often struggling to get equity in schools, housing and jobs. How is

that being analyzed in the present? It appears that most often, the poor are being scrutinized – and often negatively characterized them as the cause of the city’s problems rather than its result, as if poverty was a credential that one maintained from cradle to grave. What Wilderson’s book shows is that people take opportunities when offered. Perhaps now is the time to ask if the racism of other cities gave way a little bit easier than the racism of New Orleans, wound so tightly as it is with our caste system. The fact that the earlier black migrants could reinvent themselves freely in the North probably still applies. CHILLING CLARITY In the interest of full disclosure, I left New Orleans in 1972 to study journalism at Boston University because I wanted to get out of the South too. In 1974, I came home and worked for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and a few other small papers, and then went back to New York to be a writer, finding opportunities there that I did not have at home. Unlike earlier migrants, who did not live in an era of easy transportation, I have been able to leave and return often. I don’t think I’ve been away from New Orleans for more than a six month stretch. Similar to some of them, I remember my community practically every day – my neighbors who still sit on the porch and keep the news, my family who always sets out an extra plate when I come in town, and the openhearted second-liners who dance with me, musicians who inspired me to sing, and the people in the grocery stores and at the bus stop who tell me their life stories and listen to mine. At the end of The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson

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REVIEW

shows that the migration from the South to the North was a decision between a rock and a hard place. People left the lynchings of the South to arrive at the riots of the North. She mentions an incident in 1919 when a black boy floated into the white side of the Lake Michigan and drowned because whites threw rocks at him. As a result of his death, a riot broke out which lasted for 13 days in which 38 people were killed and 537 were injured. I know that when people left after Katrina it was because they had to. They did not want to leave forever, not initially. So they are still torn, you can bet. But what will we provide to bring them home. People want jobs, safety, education, and they want to be free from humbling themselves because of the way they look or where they grew up in town. One thing that Wilkerson’s book showed was that migrants’ possess is a chilling clarity about their needs. Survival trumps home. New Orleans now is the size it was in 1910, but without the Jim Crow suffered in my parents’ generation or in mine. Now, reading about the Great Migration as told in stunning detail and empathic insight by Isabel Wilkerson, you may just think about our 21st century Diaspora and wonder. Will our migrants stay away or will our new New Orleans, one that is so much greater than in the past, bring them home again? H

Chike and the River By Chinua Achebe Anchor Books Review by Deatra Haime Anderson Originally published in South Africa in 1966, Chinua Achebe's children's book Chike and the River finally makes its debut here in the United States. Part escapade, part fable, it is a simple but engaging story of 11-year old Chike who struggles to adapt to city life when he moves from the village of Umuofia to the big city of Onitsha to live with his uncle, a stern, unloving man. At the heart of Chike's transformation is his curiosity about the Niger River and his deep desire to cross it and experience the seductively beckoning city of Asaba on the other side. And here is where old world meets new because to get to the other side of the river, Chike must take a ferry, which cost sixpence each way, more money than he's ever held in his hand. As he hatches scheme after scheme to earn what he needs, Chike begins to explore his new surroundings while adjusting to the odd rules of this new way of life. "In Umuofia every thief was known,

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but here [in Onitsha] even people who lived under the same roof were strangers to one another. Chike was told by his uncle's servant that sometimes a man died in one room and his neighbor in the next room would be playing his gramophone. It was all very strange." He also enlists the help of his new, mischievous schoolmates, including one called S.M.O.G. who seems wise beyond his years. "Why," S.M.O.G. asks, "should we live by the River Niger and then wash our hands with spittle?" Chike thinks this is quite convincing and agrees to go on a fruitless odyssey to see a "money-doubler" capable of turning money into more money. Achebe, author of the seminal Things Fall Apart (also set in the village of Umuofia), is clearly on a mission in this tale. Supposedly, he was dismayed that the books in his daughter's school were all written by Europeans so wrote Chike and the River to give her characters she could relate to. He also had another motive: to teach through Chike's story by telling it from the perspective of an adult trying to mold how children should navigate the world; unfortunately, the result is occasionally clumsy and transparent. At one point, three of Chike's classmates are fooled by a trader into taking "brain pills" that would help them remember what they read for their exams but they started "behaving like mad people and had to be rushed to the hospital." They were okay but so shaken by the experience they failed the exams anyway. In the end, Chike does indeed cross the river, only to discover that even though the shining city of Asaba isn't what he expects, it all ends better than he ever imagined. Why? Because, as in all good folktales, Achebe wants us to know that a good heart, paired with curiosity and determination, can yield results beyond our greatest dreams. H

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August 18, 2012 - After a cloudy start to the day, The Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival welcomed the sun, a great group of talented young writers, along with published writers Jessica Hagedorn, Tayari Jones, and Earl Lovelace (below). The youngsters, of various ages and great talent, read from work developed during a free, summer writers workshop presented in Fort Greene Park, BKNYC. The NY Writer’s Coalition, www. nywriterscoalition.org, presented the event and the writing workshops.

Freelance photographer Marcia E. Wilson gallivants around NYC looking for literary events to spotlight on the "Around Town" page. She may be at a reading near you. For more visit MosaicMagazine.org.

June 13, 2012 - Colin Channer held court at Greenlight Bookstore, BKNYC, as friends and fans gathered to celebrate his newly edited book Kingston Noir. Part of Akashic Books’ “Noir” series, the latest iteration takes place in Jamaica and features writers Christopher John Farley, Patricia Powell, Thomas Glave, and Channer among others.

The Eleventh National Black Writers Conference, March 28 - April 1, 2012, BKNYC, provided writers, scholars, literary professionals, students, and the general public with forums to engage in dynamic and spirited conversapanel discussions, readings, workshops, and performances on themes 38 tions, MosaicMagazine.org related to migration, cultural memory, popular culture, and the natural environment. Pictured: Nikky Finney at the Brooklyn Public Library.

On February 18, 2012, hundreds gathered at El Museo del Barrio, in Spanish Harlem, to celebrate the life of Piri Thomas and the 45th anniversary of Down These Mean Streets. On hand to pay tribute were poets Papoleto Melendez, Nancy Mercado, Martin Espada, Gloria Vando Hickok, Emanuel Xavier, Lemon Anderson, Willie Perdomo, Mayda del Valle; as well as Junot Diaz, pictured. The event concluded with loving words from Suzie Dod Thomas, Piri’s wife.

Brooklyn Moon Revisited by Ron Kavanaugh Photos by Marcia E. Wilson Thursday, March 8, 2012 - There’s no going back. The 90s poetry scene, laden with promise, talent, and camaraderie has been displaced by motherhood, mortgages, and tenure. But for a moment, the scene, which was originally centered at Brooklyn Moon Cafe, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and numerous other closetsized spots with three tables and six chairs, was revisited in the 400-seat Cantor Auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum. As poet Jasiri observed, “I’m feeling straight up George & Weezy in here.” Organized and hosted by Jessica Care Moore & Danny Simmons, the night seemed less about the audience, and more about the infatuation with memory. Revisiting a “groovy” period where artistic practice was solidified and struggles were defeated by strength in numbers. If the Brooklyn Museum was not available this event would have happened in someone’s basement apartment. So strong was the affection and longing permeating the room.

Tony Medina

Before the event, Jessica seemed too calm, maybe not realizing what she had pulled off. Twenty poets --flung across America and the globe-- sharing the stage for the old-school glory of sharing a stage. It’s no easy feat to gather embers and restart a fire that a generation of younger poets may have little idea existed, but the duo did good. Sadly, the spark most of the poets needed was provided by the death of poet, activist, and scholar Louis Reyes Rivera who transitioned on March 3, 2012 at age 66. A legendary voice in the poetry community, almost everyone shared intimate memories of Reyes Rivera. His spirit served as “light” for the evening. Many years ago, Jessica, who was featured in Mosaic #2 in 1998, returned home to Detroit (Tigers logo tattooed with love on her right arm). She’s spent the years fully committed to business, teaching, singing, organizing, mothering, being an artist... To read the complete essay go to http://bit.ly/jcmds

Danny Simmons & Jessica Care Moore

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ANDREA

LEVY

by Tracey L. Walters 40

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The author of five books, including Small Island and The Long Song, Andrea Levy is dedicated to chronicling the Caribbean Diasporic experience in England. After a volcanic eruption kept Ms. Levy from touring the United States I was finally able to catch up with her to discuss her books and career. Tracey L. Walters: As a child growing up in England what kind of literature did you read? Were you conscious of a Black British literary tradition? Andrea Levy: I didn’t really read literature as a child. I think I’m on record as saying that I did not read a work of fiction until I was 23 years old, and that is true. I managed to get through the Dickens, Eliot and Shakespeare at school by just reading the ‘pass notes’. The truth is that TV and films were my main influence as a child. They taught me how to tell a story, and I think that still influences my writing. TLW: As for Black British literature? AL: I certainly wasn’t aware of any such tradition as a child. Subsequently of course I did discover the golden thread of Black British writing – Sam Selvon, George Lamming, Jackie Kay, Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar amongst others – but at the point that I came to writing myself it was with a sense that something was missing. I had soaked up a great deal of the African-American literature, but couldn’t find very much on the bookshop shelves that reflected the Black British experience of my generation.

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TLW: Before writing professionally you worked as a textile designer. What promoted your decision to begin writing? When did you leave the fashion design industry to start writing full-time? AL: I trained in textile weaving but only actually worked as a weaver for about ten minutes! I then worked as a dresser for the BBC and then in the costume department of the Royal Opera House. Finally I switched to graphic design and settled into a career with a small design group where I became a partner. I started writing by doing an evening class. It could have been yoga, or painting. It was a diversion. But I soon found that I had things I wanted to write about, and that I enjoyed doing it. TLW: Is Every Light in the House Burnin’ a semi-autobiographical novel? This book was one of the first comingof-age novels about growing up black in England. Did you see your book as filling a necessary void in the literary marketplace? AL: Yes, it certainly is semi-autobiographical. As I said, I couldn’t find the books that talked about the experiences of second and third generation Black Britons like myself. ‘Write what you know’ is the mantra of creative writing courses, so that is what I started by doing. TLW: Never Far From Nowhere and Fruit of the Lemon offer an honest portrayal of how challenging it was for first generation Black and British born children to find a strong sense of identity in a racially hostile environment. How hard was it for you to write about this experience? Do you think successive generations of Black Britons found a way to cope with their dual heritage? AL: The actual writing was hard, because I was learning my craft as a writer. But the subject matter came easily. It was my experiences, my memories after all. I wanted those experiences to be visible as part of the social and

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literary landscape of my country. So I suppose there was my mission right from the start. Without it I’m not sure that I would have wanted to be a writer. TLW: Things are different now, that’s for sure. There are a lot more of us for one thing, and the concept of multiculturalism is maybe more established. But ‘Identity’ as a political concept is a complex and ever-shifting thing. My friend, the writer Gary Younge, once said to me that identity was a great place to start, but a terrible place to finish. Your first three novels did relatively well and were quite popular with British audiences, especially young readers, but they did not have the international success that you found with Small Island. Why do you think Small Island appealed to a wider audience? AL: I think Britain was finally ready to hear that story. It’s a story that tinkers slightly with the national myth of the Second World War and the end of empire, but in a way that people in Britain were ready and willing to embrace. Ten years earlier and, who knows, it might not have done so well. TLW: With each novel you seem to reach back deeper into Jamaican history, was this a conscious effort? Were you trying to give voice to the experiences of your own Jamaican ancestors or were you attempting to use your novel to broaden our perception of history? AL: All my books are about me trying to explore my British Caribbean ancestry, and to place that heritage where I think it belongs – squarely in the mainstream of British history. Britain created those societies for better or worse, and she profited enormously from them. They have been relegated to the margins or, in the case of slavery, almost forgotten. I want to give them a voice,

and make that voice an accepted part of our history. TLW: Your parents were part of the Windrush generation. With Small Island you give us some sense of what life was like for Caribbean immigrants who migrated to Britain during the 40s and 50s. Did your parents ever speak about their own experiences? Did your parents have an opportunity to read Small Island? AL: I cannot recall my mum and dad ever talking to us about their experiences when I was growing up. And to be honest, I never asked. I guess I was aware of their silent sense of disappointment, and maybe even shock, at their circumstances. But their strategy was to keep their heads down, not make a fuss, and hope no one noticed them. My dad died in the mid 1980s, so he never read Small Island, which was a shame because as much as anybody it was his story. When I came to research the book I finally managed to sit down with my mum and ask her about her early days in Britain, and she opened up to me, and my tape recorder. Her memories formed an important part of the book. I think that my mother, and my siblings, have found it hard to have me writing books about ‘their business’ all these years. But I think the success of Small Island genuinely pleased my mum. Especially when I got to meet the Queen! TLW: Small Island and The Long Song are both historical novels that obviously required a lot of in-depth research. Did you uncover anything about Jamaican history that was surprising to you? Do you think this story of British colonial history should be taught in elementary schools in London or Jamaica? AL: I think it would be fair to say that Jamaican history, along with other places in the Caribbean and the Americas, is one of the most unique, strange, and brutal histories that you can imagine. Researching The Long Song

brought this home to me. Jamaica was set up as an island forced-labour camp. A massive factory involving the biggest forced movement of people in world history. So there were lots of surprises for me. But maybe the biggest surprise was the time scale. Slavery in Jamaica lasted for three hundred years. That’s the same as from the present day, back to the year 1710. What a lot of history to have mislaid! When I was at school the history topic of ‘slavery’ was mostly about William Wilberforce’s heroic struggle to end the trade. I think we deserve more than just that. TLW: With The Long Song, were you conscious about writing within the slave narrative tradition? To write this narrative did you draw from slave records or reports from your own family? Have you traced your own genealogy? AL: What I found was that, unlike in America, the British Caribbean produced very few slave narratives, and those that exist tend to be mediated through the abolitionist movement of the time so they had a specific agenda. What I wanted to find were testimonies that gave me a glimpse of the ordinary life and culture of the enslaved people. There was nothing like this. Ironically I found what I needed by reading the copious books and journals of white people in the Caribbean. They went on at great length about the trials of living amongst the ‘negroes’. I found it was easy to read between the lines of these transparent, self-serving narratives and re-imagine the actual lives of the people they were talking about. Despite trying hard I’m afraid I have not managed to get very far back yet with my own family tree. So that is still work in progress for me. TLW: The Long Song offers a version of the female slave continued on page 49

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T P R E C X E

The Long Song by Andrea Levy Picador Books First Chapter IT WAS FINISHED ALMOST as soon as it began. Kitty felt such little intrusion from the overseer Tam Dewar’s part that she decided to believe him merely jostling her from behind like any rough, grunting, huffing white man would if they were crushed together within a crowd. Except upon this occasion, when he finally released himself from out of her, he thrust a crumpled bolt of yellow and black cloth into Kitty’s hand as a gift. This was more vexing to her than that rude act—for she was left to puzzle upon whether she should be grateful to this white man for this limp offering or not . . . Reader, my son tells me that this is too indelicate a commencement of any tale. Please pardon me, but your storyteller is a woman possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink. Waxing upon the nature of trees when all know they are green and lush upon this island, or birds which are plainly plentiful and raucous, or taking good words to whine upon the cruelly hot sun, is neither prudent nor my fancy. Let me confess this without delay so you might consider whether my tale is one in which you can find an interest. If not, then be on your way, for there are plenty books to satisfy if words flowing free as the droppings that fall from the backside of a mule is your desire. Go to any shelf that groans under a weight of books and there, wrapped in leather and stamped in gold, will be volumes whose contents will find you meandering through the puff and twaddle of some white lady’s mind. You will see trees aplenty, birds of every hue and oh, a hot, hot sun residing there. That white missus will have

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you acquainted with all the many tribulations of her life upon a Jamaican sugar plantation before you have barely opened the cover. Two pages upon the scarcity of beef. Five more upon the want of a new hat to wear with her splendid pink taffeta dress. No butter but only a wretched alligator pear again! is surely a hardship worth the ten pages it took to describe it. Three chapters is not an excess to lament upon a white woman of discerning mind who finds herself adrift in a society too dull for her. And as for the indolence and stupidity of her slaves (be sure you have a handkerchief to dab away your tears), only need of sleep would stop her taking several more volumes to pronounce upon that most troublesome of subjects. And all this particular distress so there might be sugar to sweeten the tea and blacken the teeth of the people in England. But do not take my word upon it, peruse the volumes for yourself. For I have. And it was shocking to have so uplifting an act as reading invite some daft white missus to belch her foolishness into my head. So I will not worry myself for your loss if it is those stories you require. But stay if you wish to hear a tale of my making. As I write, I have a cup of sweetened tea resting beside me (although not quite sweet enough for my taste, but sweetness comes at a dear price here upon this sugar island); the lamp is glowing sufficient to cast a light upon the paper in front of me; the window is open and a breeze is cooling upon my neck. But wait . . . for an annoying insect has decided to throw itself repeatedly against my lamp. Shooing will not remove it, for it believes the light is where salvation lies. But its insistent buzzing is distracting me. So I have just squashed it upon an open book. As soon as I have wiped its bloody carcass from the page (for it is in a volume that my son was reading), I will continue my tale. H

carrying rugs in their car. If Driggs had done the same thing in this country, what would his crime be called? Why is this flashback so important to the story? What does this flashback tell the reader about Driggs? What might the author be saying about New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina with his use of this flashback? 8. What does the last illustration of the book symbolize? Essay Idea: Think about the way Johnson uses certain stereotypes to challenge the readers’ expectations about characters in the story. In Dark Water, men who look like they represent law and order are thieves, while men who look like criminals rescue victims of the storm. Try to write a scene that uses stereotypes in fresh ways. Challenge your own readers’ expectations by building tension in a scene with characters that appear to be a threat but actually offer help or assistance. You might also want to write a scene where characters that look like they should be safe are actually dangerous. Additional Activities: 1. Research the history of Congo Square, from the way the space was used during slavery to the way it’s used today. Create a timeline using pictures to tell the story of Congo Square. 2. Research Hurricane Katrina and create a timeline of the storm. Use pictures and develop a visual history of the tragedy.

4. Watch the Spike Lee film When the Levees Broke and write a review of the movie. 5. Form a small group and create an illustrated story. First, draft the short narrative you want to tell. Then, illustrate your story. You can draw, cut pictures from magazines, or use photographs to illustrate your narrative. Make sure the images you use are strong and help tell the story you’ve written. Share your narrative and the illustrations with the class. 6. Read Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes and then read other narratives that explore the experiences of young people caught in natural disasters, war, or displacement from loved ones. In what ways are these stories of children from different parts of the world similar to the stories of children in New Orleans during Katrina? In what ways are they different? Create one collage for each book that you read. Each collage should illustrate the narrative it expresses, just as Simon Gane’s illustrations help tell the story in Dark Rain. Supplemental Reading: Jewell Parker Rhodes, Ninth Ward (New Orleans) Jewell Parker Rhodes, VooDoo Dreams (New Orleans) Edwidge Danticat, Eight Days (Haiti) Flora Nwapa, Never Again (Nigeria) Doris Pilkington, Rabbit Proof Fence (Australia) Emmanuel Jal, War Child: A Soldier’s War Story (Sudan)

3. At one point in the story Sarah mentions Papa Legba. Research this orisha, including his place at the crossroads and his role as a trickster in the pantheon of the Voudoun, Santeria, Candomble, Obeah, Hoodoo, and Yoruba religions. Write a report on Legba and his presence in the cultures of people from the French, Spanish, and English speaking Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States from Louisiana to South Carolina. Make a map of the Western Hemisphere and mark the areas where people acknowledge Papa Legba.

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Theme Four

Selling Skin Color: Who Owns the Factory?, Who Works in the Factory?, Who Buys What the Factory Sells? Narrative

Skin, Inc. by Thomas Sayers Ellis Topics for Discussion: 1. What do you think of the photograph of the woman on the cover of Skin, Inc.? Does she appear to be white, Black, or Asian to you? Look at the title page and read the woman’s full name. Now, what do you think about her identity(-ies), her origin(s), her race(s)? Note that the poet, Ellis, took this photograph. Does the fact that the book’s author took the picture mean anything significant to you? Why do you think Ellis wanted this photograph to be on his book’s cover? 2. Think about the book’s title and subtitle. What does Inc. mean? What is the abbreviation’s denotation? What are the connotations associated with Inc.? What is skin? Think about denotations and connotations associated with skin. In what way(s) does skin inform identity? What does the title suggest has happened to personal identity? Think about the definition of the word repair. What does the title suggest has happened to cause this essential repair that Ellis’ poems offer the reader? Can poetry repair the damage done by private industry and social institutions? 3. Reread “A Galaxy of Black Writing” out loud in class. What does this list express about African Americans? What does this list express about our shared identity? What does it say about who we are as a people? 4. Choose your favorite poem in the book and read it out loud in class. Why is it your favorite poem? What do you think this poem might say about African Americans and identity? What do you think this poem might say

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about you? 5. Take turns reading “The Pronoun-Vowel Reparations Song” out loud in class (pages 103 – 119). How many different ways can this poem sound? What do the different sounds express? If you had to choose an identity for the speaker of this poem, who would it be? If you had to choose an intended audience to hear this poem, who would it be? 6. Ellis dedicates an entire section of his book to poems about Michael Jackson. Look at photographs of Jackson when he was a boy and compare them to pictures taken of him when he was an adolescent, a young adult, and then a grown man with children of his own. Why do you think Ellis included so many poems about Michael Jackson in his collection? What do the pictures of Michael Jackson tell you about his identity? What do the pictures tell you about the American identity? 7. Read “The Identity Repairman.” What does each heading express? What is the speaker of the poem saying about the identities of Americans of African descent? Consider the title of the poem and think about the title of the book. Read the poem out loud. Is the poem beautiful? What does that beauty express in terms of the poem’s theme? Essay Idea: Write a review of Ellis’ poetry collection. Be creative in your review. You may want to include your own poetry, photographs, or use font in interesting ways to express an idea about the work. In your review, summarize the collection of poems, closely examine one or two poems or photographs that deserve special mention, offer your opinion of the work, and advise readers as to whether or not they should buy Skin, Inc. Additional Activities: 1. Look at the photographs in the section “Mr. Dynamite Splits.” Respond to each image with a short poem of your own.

2. Use a camera to take pictures of the people you see around you. Of the pictures you take, choose 8 that you like the best. Write a poem to go with each picture. Arrange the pictures and poems in a book. 3. Write a poem every day for a week. When the week is over, choose your favorite poem and share it with the class. 4. Form a small group. Each person in your group should identify the poem that was most confusing to him or her. As a group, talk about each of those selected poems. Use a dictionary to look up words that confuse you. Try to identify the theme of each confusing poem. What does the speaker of the poem express? What does the poem say about identity? Work together to try to understand the more challenging work in the collection.

Supplemental Reading: (from a teenager named Vy who listed the best poetry books for teens on GoodReads.com, http://bit.ly/ vyspicks) Nikki Grimes, Dark Sons Marilyn Nelson, Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Iris Jacob, My Sisters’ Voices: Teenage Girls of Color Speak Out Louis Reyes Rivera and Tony Medina, Bum Rush the Page Marilyn Nelson, A Wreath for Emmett Till H

5. Have your own Def Poetry Jam. Invite the school community (including teachers, administration, and other school personnel if you’d like) to perform their best poetry at an assembly that brings the whole building together. 6. Create a literary magazine for your school. Make posters asking students to submit short stories, one-act plays, poems, and other creative writing. You may want to ask for students to submit photographs or original art as well. Create teams in your class to read through the submissions, arrange them in magazine format, print, and publish the literary magazine. When the project is completed, have a reading where contributors share their work with the audience. Make the magazine available for people in the audience to take home with them. You may want to sell the publication you produce as a fundraiser for your class or school; or, you may want to make the literary magazine available to others for free.

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Mosaic Literary presents Conference presen creative ways for fo keeping books ooks and oo reading ding valuab valuable va sources source s of knowledge k and creat eativity MLC2012.ORG

Color Me English

berets have to look at themselves too, they have to look in to a mirror and realize that they live in a continent that is in the midst of radical change, and no amount of violence from right-wing racists, or fundamentalists of any stripe, or rhetoric from politicians, or canting from the media is going to halt this change. This transition is as inevitable as the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening; the only question is, what kind of day are we going to have? Europe is no longer white and never will be again. And Europe is no longer Judaeo-Christian and never will be again. There are already fifteen million Muslims in the European Union, and the figures will grow. All of us are faced with a stark choice: we can rail against European evolution, or we can help to smooth its process. And, if we choose the latter, the first thing we must remind ourselves of is the lesson that great fiction teaches us as we sink in to character and plot and suspend our disbelief: for a moment, ‘they’ are ‘us’. I believe passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself, a world that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our daily lives. As long as we have literature as a bulwark against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance. Europe needs writers to explicate this transition, for literature is plurality in action; it embraces and celebrates a place of not truths, it relishes ambiguity, and it deeply respects the place where everybody has the right to be understood, both the thirteen-yearold boy whose books are thrown out of a bus window, and the boys who are throwing the books, and it judges neither party in the hope that by some often painfully slow process of imaginative osmosis one might finally recognize what passed before one’s eyes today, what occurred yesterday, and what will happen tomorrow, and it implores us to act with a compassion born of familiarity towards our fellow human beings, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, black, brown or white. This truly is my hope for Europe, and I know that the writer has a crucial part to play in this. I believe this. And this only. H

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books culture 48 MosaicMagazine.orgeduc ation

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11/9 & 11/10/2012 conference BRONX NY

Andrea Levy

experience that is counter to many other texts dealing with slavery. In your novel, you dispel the myth that all slave masters forced their female slaves to compromise their chastity. The love affair between the protagonist, July, and her slave owner is (at first) genuine. Why didn’t you allow for their relationship to succeed? AL: That’s an interesting question. If you mean succeed in a ‘happily-ever-after’ way then I guess I would say that although nothing is impossible, such an outcome would have been unusual in that time and place. It would have felt rather false to portray it like that. I wanted my characters to have the world-view of the time, and not to be like modern people placed in the past. With the Robert Goodwin character I really wanted to explore the rather romantic and patronizing liberalism of that time that tended to crumble in the face of reality. Many abolitionist sentiments of the time would seem to us now just like racism with a smiling face. No, for July and Robert it was never going to work! TLW: Almost all of your novels deal with the complicated relationship between blacks and whites in England and in the Caribbean. What do you try and teach your readers about race relations? AL: I don’t really see myself as trying to teach, or, even worse, to preach to anyone. I am certainly not an expert in history or racism and certainly not in present-day race relations. I’m just interested in my Caribbean heritage and I use writing as a way of exploring it. I suppose I hope that by reading my books people will get interested too. Where that takes them is up to them.

publishers were wary of black writers. They didn’t believe that a black author could carry a universal story and so they couldn’t see how they would sell many books. But I think that’s no longer the case. The fact is that for a whole host of reasons it’s tough for any new writer to get published these days, and once you are published it’s tough to get noticed. You need a lot of luck as well as everything else. I think that if a publisher has taken on a book, they are going to do their best to promote it. But, like I said, it’s tough out there. TLW: In your estimation, what is the current state of Black British literature? AL: This begs questions about quite what we mean by Black British literature, but I’m going to cut through all that and say that I think it’s in great shape. I think there has been a real flowering of Black British voices in literature over the last few decades and I think they are producing some of the most interesting and challenging work around. Long may it continue. TLW: What can readers expect from your next novel? Would you ever consider writing a collection of short stories or a play? AL: I never talk about what I’m working on. I’m a bit superstitious that way. I have written and published short stories before, and I’m sure I will do again. And I did think about trying to write a play, but then I thought maybe not. But then again, who knows? H

TLW: You have been writing a lot longer than some of your peers (Smith and Ali for example), and yet some readers are only now beginning to discover your work. Courttia Newland, Jackie Kay, and Bernadine Evaristo are others who have been writing for a long time and yet do not get the same recognition. Why do you think the British publishing industry has been so selective in their promotion of Black British writers? AL: I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Certainly there was a time, not so long ago, when British

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