WHAT WE ASK OF FLESH
M.G. VASSANJI
AMERICANAH
Summer 2013 $6.00
L I T E R A R Y M A G A Z I N E
EDUCATOR LESSON PLANS
3 0
Emily Raboteau Searching for Zion MosaicMagazine.org
1
2
MosaicMagazine.org
Before you continue through this issue take a moment to scan this with your smartphone then continue about your business. Thanks!
Three issues of Mosaic Literary Magazine for $15 MosaicMagazine.org
3
Editorial Swing down sweet chariot / stop and let me ride –Parliament As Mosaic continues the search for its own editorial nirvana, we explore Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora. The memoir reflects the writer’s quest for a Black nexus that connects and grounds people of the African Diaspora. A quest Mosaic knows all too well. Issue #30 complimens the spectrum of Africana. Clarence V. Reynolds interviewed Kenya-born, Tanzania-raised, and selfidentified African-Asian Canadian writer M.G. Vassanji. His new book is The Magic of Saida –the story “of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved.” This issue also features reviews by two Nigerian writers. Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, is the writer’s fourth work of wonderfulness. While fellow countrywoman Yejide Kilanko makes her debut with Daughters Who Walk This Path. Also presenting her first novel is Haitian Elsie Augustave, whose book The Roving Tree is reviewed on page 22. Our lesson plan designer Eisa Nefertari Ulen has sampled and remixed Raboteau’s work into an excellent tool for educators who are dedicated to developing literate, well-rounded, and culturally diverse high school students. Fifteen year ago I started down this path, providing while searching for a place where readers could discover literary artists of all African ilk and broaden access to these voices. I, too, am a seeker.
Ron Kavanaugh Publisher
4
MosaicMagazine.org
Interviews M.G. Vassanji by Clarence V. Reynolds ...................................................... 12 Emily Raboteau by Clarence V. Reynolds ................................................... 26 Award-winning writer Emily Raboteau was twenty-three when she started the research for her recently published book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, for which she traveled through parts of five nations. Zion is a geographical place: In Jerusalem, it is both a holy realm and homeland for Jews. Raboteau’s project looks at Zion another way—as a metaphor for liberation in the African Diaspora, both as a hope for homeland and a state of spiritual enlightenment. Poems trail mix by Latasha N. Nevada Diggs ......................................................... 18 (Boo Yaa) by Latasha N. Nevada Diggs ....................................................... 19 Nicole, Age Seven --for Nicole Reid by Remica L. Bingham ....................... 40 Kuperberg, South Side Street Photo by Remica L. Bingham ....................... 41 Reviews .......................................................................................................... 20 What We Ask of Flesh by Remica L. Bingham The Roving Tree by Elsie Augustave Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Daughters Who Walk This Path by Yejide Kilanko The House Girl by Tara Conklin Excerpt Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau .................................................................................... 29 Mosaic Lesson Plans ....................................................................................... 30 Searching for Zion lesson plan for high-school educators Designed by Eisa Nefertari Ulen Mosaic’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. Around Town by photographer Marcia E. Wilson ............................................ 42 Cover photo: Marcia E. Wilson
MosaicMagazine.org
5
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 Š 2013. No portion of this magazine can be reprinted or reproduced in any form without prior permission from the publisher. Retail Distribution Publisher’s Distribution Gruop info@pdgmags.com Subscribe online: MosaicMagazine.org 3 Issues: $16.00 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. POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: Mosaic 314 W. 231 St #470 Bronx, NY 10463
6
MosaicMagazine.org
Fat from Papa’s Head Tony Lindsay
Tony Lindsay’s ‘Fat from Papa’s Head’ is a wonderful collection of short stories targeted at young adults. All of the protagonists are young African-American male teenagers and young adults. available at
MosaicMagazine.org
7
a space to create Harlem Co-Workers offers subsidized space for writers and other creative professionals in Harlem, NY. Email harlemcoworkers@gmail.com for details. Harlem Co-Workers thanks our platinum donors: Ms. Asha Lewis, Mr. Christopher Stanard, Mr. Christian Melendez, Professor Michele L. Simms, and Mrs. Debra Spencer. Special thanks to the following writers, artists, and businesses: Ify Amobi, Lisa Bauer, Victoria Brown, William Jelani Cobb, Kristen Gallagher, Fiona Gardner, Twanna Hines, Allison Joseph, Marjan Kamali, Victor LaValle, Nathan W. Moon, Mosaic Magazine, Mommie Helen’s Bakery, Christa Parravani, Emily Raboteau, Tacuma Roeback, Tedra Rose, Akiba Solomon, Patricia Spears Jones, James Thomas, Chinyelu Udoh, and Illan Woll. Harlem Co-Workers is founded by Rochelle Spencer, co-editor of All About Skin: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color (University of 8
MosaicMagazine.org
Wisconsin Press) and Peter A. McKay, Chief Product Officer of Roscoe Labs.
contributors Remica L. Bingham earned an MFA from Bennington College, is a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Her first book, Conversion (Lotus Press, 2006), won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Her second book, What We Ask of Flesh, was published by Etruscan Press in February 2013. Currently, she is the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University. She resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. For more information on her work and upcoming events, please visit: www. remicalbingham.com. Colleen Lutz Clemens, Ph.D., assistant professor of Non-Western Literatures at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, earned her Ph.D. in Post-Colonial Literature at Lehigh University. Her research focuses on issues of veiling in literature and studies the intersection of women’s issues in art and politics. Her academic work has been published in Feminist Formations. She is the editor of several books of non-fiction including Philadelphia Reflections: Stories from the Delaware to the Schuylkill and has published short essays in various collections including Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. She lives in Bucks County with her partner, two dogs, and daughter. She can be reached at via her blog kupoco.wordpress.com. Leigh Cuen is a freelance journalist from California, currently living in Israel. Her work has been published by Women’s eNews, Ynet, the San Francisco Public Press, World Literature Today and many others. Follow her work at leighcuen. tumblr.com
Writer, vocalist, and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of three chapbooks, which include IchiBan and Ni-Ban (MOH Press), Manuel is destroying my bathroom (Belladonna), and the album Televisíon. Her work has been published in Rattapallax, Black Renaissance Noir, Nocturnes, Fence, Ploughshares, The Black Scholar, P.M.S, LA Review, Jubilat, Everything But the Burden, and Muck Works among others. LaTasha and writer Greg Tate are the founders and editors of yoYO/SO4 Magazine. Danielle A. Jackson is a digital media strategist and freelance writer. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. 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. Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Central Florida, Nicole Sealey is a Cave Canem graduate fellow whose work was selected for inclusion in Best New Poets 2011. Winner of the 2012 Poetry International Prize and finalist for the 2011 Third Coast Poetry Prize, her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Drunken Boat, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Third Coast, among other literary online and print journals. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at New York University.
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. 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.
MosaicMagazine.org
9
Mosaic Literary Magazine thanks the following Publisher’s Circle members for believing. William Aguado Crystal Bobb-Semple Justin Collins Linda Duggins Kim Coleman Foote Rigoberto Gonzalez Rachel Eliza Griffiths Troy Johnson Sandra Kitt Lutishia Lovely Ron McKenzie Elizabeth Nunez Meows Osse The Page-Turner Network Lorraine Patrick J. Everett Prewitt Charles Rice-Gonzalez Karen McLane Torian Marcia E. Wilson Anonymous We rely on the generosity of our supporters, subscribers, and readers. Join our cause. Your support will help maintain the quality editorial and education programs you’ve come to expect. Donate $100 and become a Publisher’s Circle member. Strengthen our ability to present the literary arts. Yes, you can make a difference. Visit www.MosaicMagazine.org.
Ron Kavanaugh Mosaic Literary Magazine
10
MosaicMagazine.org
Your book doesn’t have to be a mystery.
Finally, a place for popular fiction & nonfiction that reflects the African-American book market.
The Power List gives publishers the marketing muscle to help reach a diverse readership. MosaicMagazine.org
11
Brought to you by AALBC.com, Cushcity.com, & MosaicBooks.com/powerlist.info
M.G. VASSANJI by Clarence V. Reynolds
12
MosaicMagazine.org
It comes as no surprise that when M.G. Vassanji’s book won a regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize the honor was an auspicious beginning for the first-time novelist. In 1994, his novel The Book of Secrets received the inaugural Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s prestigious literary award, and further solidified Vassanji as an important literary voice. He has since written seven novels, two short– story collections, a travel memoir about India, and a biography of famed Canadian writer and journalist Mordecai Richler. He also served as editor of The Toronto Review of Contemporary Writing Abroad, a literary magazine he cofounded in 1981. At the heart of many of Vassanji’s enthralling and complex works is his examination of racial relations and class distinctions; his stories deal with the lives of East African Indians, like himself (he considers himself, noted on his website, as African-Asian Canadian). The tales are often centered on immigrants who may have questions about their own background, and he stated that his own displacement and movements give him the ability to empathize with other people who may be or have been in similar situations. “The exploration of cultures allows me to explore the personalities and differences based on history and family background,” he added. Being awarded the first Giller Prize was indeed another sign of good literary fortune for Vassanji, as he went on to receive the esteemed prize again in 2003 for The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. The award-winning The Gunny Sack was first published by the African Writers Series, whose first series editor was the late Chinua Achebe. His other awards include the Governor General’s Literary Award; the Harbourfront Festival Prize; and the Bressani Literary Prize. About The Assassin’s Song, he said, “The novel is in a sense about the burden of tradition.” Published in 2007, the book was shortlisted for India’s Crossword Book Award.
MosaicMagazine.org
13
With a head of wavy, grey hair and a well-trimmed goatee and mustache, Vassanji has a distinguished appearance, and the welcoming smile is representative of his affable character. At a recent reading and conversation at The Center for Fiction, in New York, for his latest book, The Magic of Saida, he greeted the audience in the intimate atmosphere with gentle enthusiasm. Before the program, we began a brief conversation about his newest work and his career; we followed up with an email exchange. Clarence V. Reynolds: Congratulations on The Magic of Saida. This is a beautiful story with several themes, and one that stands out is that it is a love story, of various kinds. There is the love between a young boy and a young girl; the love between a mother and her son; the bond between two brothers; and the love of poetry. How would you describe the story? M. G. Vassanji: I would describe it as a love story that in its development and description tells other stories. It is set in Kilwa, the ancient town on the east coast of Africa, which is associated historically with slavery, international (Indian Ocean) trade, and twentieth-century colonialism, as well as Swahili culture and poetry. This history is manifest in various forms in the lives of the people. The story of Kilwa is therefore also the story of the two childhood sweethearts in the book. Thus, the boy Kamal is mesmerized by the history narrated by the old poet of the town. Reynolds: You were born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania, and now you live in Toronto. Can you recall early literary influences, and did you have any favorite authors
14
MosaicMagazine.org
or books when you were growing up? Vassanji: What I read earlier were children’s books from England and later thrillers and potboilers from England and America. I read, listened to on BBC, and was told stories from Charles Dickens. Grimm’s and Andersen’s fairy tales. Our own Indian religious tradition gave us lots of oral poetry, heard everyday and religious stories. I recall staring at volumes of Dostoevsky in the city library shelves and wondering if I should dare pick them up. Later in life, I read almost all of them. In high school, almost arbitrarily, I picked up James Baldwin’s Another Country, and I was balled over. I wrote a composition on it for my English class. Reynolds: Kamal Punja, the main character in The Magic of Saida, is a physician who leaves his successful career in Canada and returns to his homeland in East Africa in search of childhood love after living abroad for thirty-five years. As his journey unfolds, he seems to ask himself, what is it [life] all about? Is this a question you used as a guide in creating and writing this story? Vassanji: I didn’t use it as a guide, but it’s a question that was essential to my religious upbringing (I am no longer religious in the conventional sense) and later it occurred in a new form in my readings in existentialism. I’ve been rereading Tolstoy and I’ve been moved to see how he explores this question in some of his stories and novels. It’s not a fashionable subject now. Reynolds: In The Magic of Saida, as with several of your earlier works, the main characters come from very different ethnic backgrounds and develop strong relation-
ships. Can you share your thoughts about exploring the various cultures such as African, Arab, and Indian in your storytelling? Vassanji: When I think of my upbringing in coastal East Africa—Dar es Salaam—I am quite amazed to realize how much tolerance there was of differences, and at the same time how much ignorance and discrimination there was among the races and communities. It’s often said that Asians would not marry Africans; actually they did and they didn’t. In the early twentieth century, Indian railway workers married Nandi and Masai women. Asians had taboos against Africans and against each other; the Africans had their own taboos. Often these taboos had to do with religious faith. When one of my cousins wanted to marry a man from another Asian community, the couple had to flee to England, and this was my widowed aunt’s great shame and tragedy. But as a new generation came, changes began to happen. It’s these relationships that I have explored. Reynolds: And consider Kamal’s ethnic and racial identity, his father was Indian and his mother African. He has hard time figuring out just where he belongs. Vassanji: We had a number of people called chotara, who were half-African and half-Indian. They tended to be poor, though in some cases they simply were adopted by some relation or family friend and grew up like anybody else. In my Indian community, the fundamental differentiating factor was religious faith. Last year, when I visited Dar es Salaam, I was asked to see some early education kids, and when I stood in front of them I was amazed to see Asians (Indians), half-Asians, and total
MosaicMagazine.org
15
Africans (using these descriptions to describe their features). All this is not to say there are never any problems. There are always problems when races mix, and poverty is around. Race is an easy fault line, and life for most people is hard. Reynolds: How important is language in your stories? For example, how did incorporating Swahili in The Magic of Saida come about? Was it a natural part of the storytelling? Vassanji: For me it is natural and easy. I use Swahili-like inflexions for Swahili dialogue; sometimes I insert something completely in Swahili; the meaning is evident in the context or is suggested by the rest of the text without being intrusive. The same thing when I insert a dialogue or speech in an Indian language. These techniques have been used by Jewish writers. Reynolds: As with any story that engages the reader, your latest book is a multilayered tale with several themes and plot lines. There are also several conflicts that take place. And one that occurs in the story is the conflict of whether a person has to become a collaborator in order to survive or is it best to remain an idealist and face struggles. This is such a realistic truth. Can you comment about this kind of conflict in life and in your book? Vassanji: In day-to-day life, for example, one may believe in greater equality among people, yet to survive we still put money in banks and investment accounts. Or we do not say exactly what we think all the time for fear of reprisals. I think [Noam] Chomsky mentions something similar in a recent interview. In the colonial situation, the colonists always depended on a local cadre of policemen and soldiers to impose their rule—in India, South Africa, German East Africa, Kenya. But what about a poet? In my book, the choice faced is to collaborate but then be able to write and thus bear witness; or to be idealistic and perish. Reynolds: From your first book, The Book of Secrets, to your latest, you present illuminating historical details. What was the research like for this book in which you create an insurrection and resistance against a European Continued on page 49
16
MosaicMagazine.org
New from the Leading Publisher of
AFRICAN AMERICAN RESOURCES Youth Ministry in the Black Church: Centered in Hope By Anne E. Wimberly, Sandra L. Barnes, Karma D. Johnson
Faith and failure, triumph and travail, hope and hard questions—this is the complex mix facing youth ministry leaders in the black church today. Youth Ministry in the Black Church: Centered in Hope is the bridge between youth leaders’ desire for holistic and relevant ministry and the hope-centered leadership necessary to make it happen. Using Scripture, case illustrations, anecdotes, best practices, and reflection points, this resource is practical and beneficial for leaders, pastors and parents. Youth Ministry in the Black Church: Centered in Hope is sure to renew the vision and promise of youth ministry in churches.
God’s Graffiti: Inspiring Stories for Teens By Romal Tune
“Is there anyone in the Bible like me?” The answer is, Yes! No one escapes the challenges of childhood, but we can conquer them! Highlighting noted “at-risk” youth in the Bible and sharing his own story of growing up in poverty amid crime and violence, Rev. Romal Tune details how obstacles can become opportunities through faith. Both practical and inspirational, this Bible study celebrates men and women in Scripture who left troubled pasts behinds to claim purpose-filled futures! 978-0-8170-1733-0 $13.99
978-0-8170-1736-1 $16.99 MosaicMagazine.org
To order Judson Press resources, call 800-458-3766 or visit www.judsonpress.com. Save 20% when you order online!
17
trail mix However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child. State Senator Constance Johnson of Oklahoma on the Every Sperm is Sacred Amendment to Personhood Bill
They’re all fruit. State Senator Nina Turner of Ohio on the Viagra Bill
tilth is a womb. craven is the banana lost at sea. it needs jesus like all heathens do. wasted corn kernels, the shame! is what spilt not life? into the spume semen dies. all alive wading. all normal. dead. abnormal. wading. about 40 million each jack. stumpy dates, copious eggplants lacking the guidance of anal governments. American sperm needs our love! there’s a crisis and the strapping Norse is winning. and thahn long seed is more exotic than Bronzeville peanuts making double penetration pop on ghetto-tube. globules of little tails sure to be tarnished. fertile lubes: Viagra, turkey baster fatalities. we cherish our melon busboys and mulberry janitors. look towards Brazil for a sign: passion fruits shaped like man’s sex. outlaw the neglect of apples. outlaw the abuse of pumpkins. against, not for the test tubes. god gets quite irate over dried up grapes. men’s spurned daggers bound for banks. drunk fruit flies crave, bemoan sexual healing from hand. or mouth. seamen think little of the nation’s health.
Latasha N. Nevada Diggs
18
MosaicMagazine.org
MosaicMagazine.org
19
What We Ask of Flesh by Remica L. Bingham Etruscan Press Review by Nicole Sealey Matthew 26:41 reads, “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” This may well be true, but let’s not mistake willingness for ability and weakness for inability. What We Ask of Flesh, Remica L. Bingham’s second collection of poems, quells such confusion—asking nothing of and relinquishing power over a rebel body that insists upon itself. What we ask of flesh lingers in relief of what fate demands of it. Despite our pleas (and please), we’re bound to its ruin. What We Ask of Flesh is similarly bound. Less concerned with the narrator’s mother than the narrator’s inherent need to mother, the poem “Maieusiophobia” is the subconscious effort of a mind wrestling with the limitations of a body. While fear first prevents the reality of childbearing, the narrator’s failing body is currently to blame. Now that the decision is no longer hers to make, she longs for the opportunity. A longing, she believes, her mother intuits with an intuition the narrator can only imagine and, subsequently, envy. My mother is unattainable and I have come to accept this. So when the doctor tells me— my legs spread wide, the tiny head of a probe invading my cervix— There may be a problem I am relieved, almost happy at the damage.
20
MosaicMagazine.org
reviews
Happy is a hard word to render poetic when one is urged to show, not tell. The pairing of almost with happy, however, is so exceptionally tragic that it requires no illustration whatsoever. And, the uncertainty of cheer suggests unhappiness, if not devastation, to come. It is this repressed distress, this refusal to feel that is the most troubling. That this happens within fifteen lines, the book’s most compact poem, speaks to Bingham’s lyric sensibility. As Lucille Clifton once replied to someone asking why she wrote such short poems, “When I get to the end, I stop.” The same can be said of Bingham.
laid to rest with her literal grandmother, while Bingham kneels at the feet of her literary foremothers.
Another poem that applies such sensibility is “Will and Testament”. This isn’t the usual upon my death poem in which whatnots are willed to the survived. The narrator entrusts her most prized possession, her remains, to family. Preoccupied more with the happiness of the living than her life after death, the speaker’s homegoing is wholly dependent on her mother’s approval.
Winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award for her debut collection, Conversion, Bingham continues to blend the best of the tradition with her distinct vision. What We Ask of Flesh employs craft, but relies heavily on heart—and is the better for it. Remica L. Bingham’s voice, as Patricia Smith notes in the book’s introduction, “rises, sole and singular, above the fray as she conjures a soundtrack for the wife, the mother, the sister, the daughter…” Without music, a poem is but information. What We Ask of Flesh is a memorable score.
Cremate me. Do it quickly, without fanfare, Unless this troubles my mother.
If there is marching down to the family plot, I’d like to be with Grandmama, near Granddaddy, at the edge of the cemetery by the highway off Grace Street, as good a place as any to lie.
If she can’t stand the thought of not seeing me Slick and stiff in a prettied-up box, Give her what she wants; Even in death there are sacrifices. “Will and Testament” foreshadows “How I Crossed Over,” an elegy to Lucille Clifton, Ai, and Carolyn Rogers. By its placement as the penultimate poem, the former enacts the very thing the deceased in the poem desires: to be buried with Grandmama. The speaker is
MosaicMagazine.org
21
The Roving Tree by Elsie Augustave Open Lens/Akashic Books Review by Danielle A. Jackson
dance rooted in the technique and scholarship of Katherine Dunham. Dance becomes Iris’s professional calling, but also serves as a gateway to her home country and helps to heal her rootlessness.
The Roving Tree, the ethereal, sprawling debut novel by Haitian-born New York writer and educator Elsie Augustave, opens with a dimension-bending conversation between its human protagonist Iris Odys and the Haitian goddess of fertility, Aida Wedo. As Iris lingers on the border between life and death shortly after the birth of her daughter, Aida Wedo urges her earthly charge to write the story of her life for posterity.
While attending a predominately New England college in the 70s Iris starts to shape a black identity. She becomes a leader in the Black Student League, where the students discuss “going back to the motherland.” During her junior year, Iris befriends a new Haitian student, Pépé, and what develops is an interesting first-generation versus native-born cultural conflict. Pépé, born and raised in Haiti amongst her own family, is an American literature major who eschews traditions like vodou and speaking Creole, while Iris, majoring in dance and anthropology, clings to these markers of conceptual “Haitian-ness” for dear life.
The story starts in earnest with a chronological account of Iris’s life when she is adopted at the age of five by Margaret and John, a white, upper middle class couple and moves from her small Haitian village to Westchester, New York. Predictably, Iris has difficulty settling into her new life. She longs for her birth mother and the familiarity of her first home. As you can imagine the neighbors are perplexed by this multiethnic family and often stare at them. One unscrupulous acquaintance even attempts to touch young Iris’s hair to satisfy his curiosity of what “these people’s hair” feels like. Iris’s parents enroll her in a quality elementary school, but it is here that she encounters even more blatant American racism: bullying and harassment, the word “nigger” and taunts of “go back to Africa.” Despite these challenges, she does find normalcy and a burgeoning confidence due to the unconditional love and support of her new family. Her godfather Latham provides a steadying force as well and introduces her to Afro-Caribbean
22
MosaicMagazine.org
Because The Roving Tree is told from Iris’s perspective, the reader learns the circumstances of her early life as she does, with a gradual unraveling through stories set aside in their own chapters. Told in the third person, these seemingly objective accounts are just as important, if not more so, than the larger first-person narrative which envelops them. Iris’s past is prologue, but it is such a driving force in her life that it has not truly passed. In one account, the reader learns that Iris’s birth mother, Hagathe, is a soft-spoken woman from a family with a unifying matriarchal lineage who worked under less than ideal conditions as a maid to a wealthy family. Crushed by the vulnerability of poverty and stalked by a ruthless Tonton Macoute (a member of the military force of brutal dictator Francois Duvalier or Papa Doc), Hagathe welcomes the adoption of Iris as fortuitous, a chance for her young daughter to live a life with opportunity.
While home for Christmas break, Iris is summoned back to Haiti due to a family tragedy and confronts this heritage. She reacquaints herself with the women of her family and learns the secret of her paternity while bearing witness to the layers of inequality and injustice that color the lives of less-privileged Haitians. She learns of the spirits that guide her lineage, skeptically observing the syncretism between Catholic and ancestral traditions. But she is also haunted by these spirits in her own dreams, in warnings she does not heed and in the deep knowing that she sometimes chooses to ignore. Lamercie, Iris’s great-grandmother tells her about an ancestor, Nlunda a Kinkulu, who spoke Kikongo, a Bantu language that originated in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire) and Angola: ‘At night, she would tell me stories about her family in Africa. She also told me not to forget that I am African and that she hoped that her children would return to Africa someday. My grandmother’s face appeared to me on the ground when I was about to dig a hole to bury your umbilical chord, and a song she had taught me long ago that I thought I’d forgotten came back to me. That’s how I know her spirit is connected to yours.’ Iris returns to college and for her senior thesis choreographs a large production that synthesizes her broad intellectual and personal interests in Pan-Africanism. Through her godfather Latham, she meets the head master of a dance academy in Zaire who offers her a teaching job at his institution. While contemplating her future, she moves to New York City and has her first love affair - with a young white banker who is enamored with her, but cannot understand her sense of connectedness
MosaicMagazine.org
23
to Africa. Despite his and her adopted mother’s initial reservations, she accepts the job in Zaire and makes the voyage to Africa.
otherworldly conversation that represents a reckoning between time and space and the interconnectedness of life, death, the past, present, and future.
It is in Africa that Iris’s adult life unfolds and the idealism of her adolescence gives way to reality. Kinshasa in the early 1980s is rife with the same corruption, inefficiency and poverty that cripples Haiti. She starts her job at the dance institute after frustrating bureaucratic delays; yet these delays allow an opportunity to learn her new environment. Many of her new friends make livings as sex workers, polygamy is rampant, and the scourge of AIDS begins to rear its ugly head. But eventually, Iris flourishes professionally as a dance instructor and falls in love so deeply with Bolingo, a married government official and revolutionary, that she considers becoming his second wife. By the end of The Roving Tree, Iris has developed a connection to her cultural identity that is more authentic than visceral, weaving together its disparate parts into a coherent whole, while simultaneously growing into a full woman who must grapple with the consequences of her choices.
Sometimes, the dialogue feels less than organic, as if the author has not yet learned to surrender to the voices of her characters. This becomes a barrier to full engagement and empathy with the characters and is really a missed opportunity. Augustave is talented and possesses an important voice, though; she will rectify this in novels to come. Her interest in the cultures of the black diaspora has breadth and depth, and her lyrical style is as breathtaking and layered as a song - with harmonies and dissonant notes, a strong, unifying melody sang by a compelling lead character, all over a full band accompaniment – the sonorous backdrops of Haiti, America, and Zaire.
Augustave creates a stunning tale with beautiful language that dwells in the realm of magical realism. Yet the author does not shy away from the very real issues of poverty, the position of women in patriarchal societies, the aftermath of sexual assault or broad themes of alienation and rootlessness. She skillfully sprinkles this headiness into the story in a non-didactic way that somehow still allows the importance of this subtext to be realized. The characters are rich, complicated and full of color and nuance, especially Iris. Augustave constructs her novel in a non-linear way; it begins just as it ends, with an
24
MosaicMagazine.org
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Alfred A. Knopf Review by Colleen Lutz Clemens It’s been four years since the 2009 publication of Chimamanda Adichie’s stunning short story collection The Things Around Your Neck. The wait has been worth it. Adichie who calls both Nigeria and the United States home, uses her movement to inform her latest novel, Americanah. The new work, which takes the reader from Nigeria to the United States and back, is a sweeping narrative that is part bildungsroman, part postcolonial tome, and part transcontinental love story. The novel succeeds in its ambition—as all of her work has done—and leaves the reader satisfied, perhaps too satisfied. Ifemelu, daughter of a man enamored of the mores the colonizing British have left behind and a god-fearing mother, falls in love with Obinze, son of an outspoken university professor raising her son alone after the death of his father, during secondary school. Witnessing their love is a delight, as they learn how to please each other physically and intellectually. It is Obinze’s idea that Ifem leave the university system in which professors are constantly striking for the consistency of the American academy, and that he will join her upon finishing his degree. Adichie deftly moves the reader through crucial moments of the plot, dedicating her attention more to the nuances of identity formation. In one paragraph, Ifem goes from never imagining being a student in the U.S. to being in America: “Ifemelu did not quite grasp what it all meant, but it sounded correct because it came from Continued on page 44
MosaicMagazine.org
25
Award-winning writer Emily Raboteau was twenty-three when she started the research for her recently published book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013), for which she traveled through parts of five nations. Zion is a geographical place: In Jerusalem, it is both a holy realm and homeland for Jews. Raboteau’s project looks at Zion another way—as a metaphor for liberation in the African Diaspora, both as a hope for homeland and a state of spiritual enlightenment. Raboteau, who teaches writing at City College in New York, talked about the genesis of her book and shared personal stories of her decade-long travels and ideas of Zion during a program presented by Kweli Journal, in partnership with The New York Times African Heritage Network. Following her conversation with poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, Raboteau generously answered a few questions for Mosaic. Clarence V. Reynolds: You stated that among the things that inspired you to write Searching for Zion was the fact that you were interested in what the metaphor for Zion means in the African Diaspora and, on a more personal level, you were searching for a way of finding and talking to your father. Would you care to explain more about
by Clarence V. Reynolds
26
MosaicMagazine.org
EMILY RABOTEAU Searching for Zion
MosaicMagazine.org
27
the things that motivated you to begin this project? How did you happen upon this broad topic for a book? Emily Raboteau: Yes, I see the book as engaging and extending my father’s scholarship. He’s a historian specializing in African-American religion. I had an understanding through his work but also through the lyrics of some Negro spirituals and reggae songs such as “Go Down Moses” and “Iron, Lion, Zion,” of Zion as a black metaphor for freedom. After encountering and writing about two groups of black Jews in Israel — the Ethiopian Jewry (so-called “Falashas”) and the African Hebrew Israelites (so-called “Black Hebrews”) — and the exoduses they had made to get to the Holy Land, I found I wanted to continue writing along this theme. I then sought out other black communities that had left home out of feelings of disinheritance to find the “Promised Land” elsewhere using the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Exodus as motivation. My subjects included Rastafarians from the Caribbean living in Ethiopia, African-American ex-pats living in Ghana, Hurricane Katrina transplants from my own family, and others. Their personal journeys, which were often about the retrieval of history, often sounded to me like the search of the orphan for a lost parent. CVR: After ten years of journeying, how would you describe Zion for yourself? Raboteau: If I may continue to think of Zion as a metaphor for liberation, then I would describe it as a place I aspire to enter daily, rather than a place on a map where I might arrive. The Promised Land that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of right before he died was not a country. It was an ideal striving for human relationships, for caring
28
MosaicMagazine.org
about the freedom of others as much as we care about it for our individual selves or for our discrete communities. My quest wasn’t actually about identity, but about faith. I struck out when I was twenty-three looking for a place to belong, but I was asking the wrong question. It shouldn’t have been, “Where is my home?” but “What can I do for others?” This may sound obvious, but it took me until I was thirty-three and had trotted half the globe to come to such an understanding. Putting that understanding into daily practice is the harder part. CVR: As you were globe-trotting and conducting research for Zion, you were probably also writing your novel, The Professor’s Daughter. Can you explain the thought processes of doing two different projects around the same time and was there any connection between the two as your were working on them? Raboteau: I spent ten years (from age twenty-three to thirty-three) conducting the travel and research that led to Searching for Zion. Then I spent about another year crafting what I had learned into a book. (I wrote the bulk of the book in Amsterdam while pregnant with my first child.) I wrote my first novel, The Professor’s Daughter, during those years of travel in my mid-twenties. In fact, I finished it while living in Brazil. One connection between the two works is my interest in the world beyond the contiguous United States. Parts of my novel take place in Ethiopia and South Africa; and the bulk of my memoir, which I think of as a travelogue, takes place abroad in parts of Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Both books are also preoccupied with the different claims that black history makes upon individuals of African descent.
excerpt
CVR: What message do you hope readers come away with after reading Searching for Zion? Raboteau: I can’t help thinking of that satirical Wayans brothers’ movie Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, when I hear the word “message.” You may remember, every time there’s a message, like “I guess even though we were free, we were still slaves in the mind,” Keenen Ivory Wayans pops up as the mailman and cries, “Message!” So I’ll just share one of the best pieces of wisdom I received during my travels. It came to me in Jamaica from the amazing author and activist Thomas Glave. He said that even if Jamaica could miraculously become for all its citizens the paradise it is for tourists, it would still fail to be paradise so long as other people in the world continued to suffer. As he put it: “An island of Zion is no Zion at all.” It was an important truth for me to hear, and so I shared it in my book for others to hear, too. CVR: This question may sound like one asked earlier, but if someone were to ask you “Does Zion exist?” How would you answer? Raboteau: We may think we are in Zion, but if our neighbors on the other side of the fence are not there with us, then we are deluding ourselves. Enter the mailman: “Message!” ★
Searching for Zion The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau I stepped off the bus from the capital at noon, or six o’clock in Ethiopia where the hours are counted from dawn, and hailed a bajaj in the driving rain. I was in Shashemene, Promised Land of the Rastafari, 150 miles south of Addis Ababa’s ring of hills, scrim of car exhaust, thickets of eucalyptus trees, mass of Orthodox churches, and luxury hotels towering over tin-shack slums. Though Addis Ababa was hardly romantic, Shashemene was far less so. “It’s a truck stop,” assessed Fekadu, the man who sat next to me on the long bus ride along the Cairo–Cape Town Highway. He meant it was a grubby place, a nothing place, a place between other places. Shashemene was known, he explained, for its leprosarium, its poverty, and its draught. Fekadu was perplexed that I should want to travel there rather than the hot springs of Wondo Genet or Lake Ziway, famed for its birdlife. “Where is your husband?” he Continued on page 36
MosaicMagazine.org
29
L ITERARY
MAGAZINE
Summer 2013 MosaicMagazine.org Mosaic’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
30
MosaicMagazine.org
Lesson Plan Searching for Zion
In Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, Emily Raboteau’s second book, the author journeys from New York to Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South on a quest for the Black Promised Land. A memoir that penetrates Raboteau’s deep need for a homeland to call her own, this narrative expresses the African American longing for a place to belong. The forced displacement of Africans and the subsequent erasure of an authentic African identity has generated the beautiful, expressive culture of Diasporic peoples in the west. Yet, an insistent urge to locate a place of origination persists in the communal heart of slave descendants, and this narrative is its pulse.
I. Understanding the Narrative A. Topics for Discussion 1. What is a memoir? How is memoir different from autobiography? 2. What is a travelogue? 3. Think about the book’s organization. What does each section title tell the reader? How do the chapters within each section help the reader understand the narrative? 4. Think about the very last chapter title. What does Ishem mean? In what ways does “Ishem” respond to “Do You Know Where Canaan Is?” 5. Raboteau employs humor throughout this memoir. What does humor do for the author, especially in tense moments? What does humor do for the reader in those tense scenes? 6. What is a diaspora? Most people think of the African Diaspora primarily as North America, parts of South America, like Brazil and Guyana, and the Caribbean. Where is the diaspora that Raboteau discovers? 7. Were you as surprised as Raboteau to learn that Ethiopians live in Israel, Jamaicans live in
MosaicMagazine.org
31
Ethiopia, and African Americans live in Ghana? Think about the fact that these groups have immigrated from their home countries to form community in a new land. Have any of them found the Promised Land? 8. What does Raboteau think about each country she visits before she goes? What does Raboteau think about each country when she returns? Does she find the Promised Land? B. Essay Ideas 1. Write your own memoir. First, choose a place you’ve visited. Maybe you’ve been on a family vacation or day trip and want to write about that experience. Maybe you’ve gone to visit family members who live in another town or city. Perhaps you’ve gone away to camp. You can even write about your experience going back and forth to school. Or, maybe you live part of the time with one caregiver and part of the time with another caregiver. Choose one journey that is memorable. Next, describe what happened during the journey you select. If you can, interview someone else who made the same trip and include their memories, just as Raboteau includes the voices of other travelers in Searching for Zion. How does the person you interviewed feel about the journey they made with you? How do you feel about the journey you made with them? 2. Create a collection of classroom memoirs that is organized in a way that is similar to Raboteau’s memoir. In each of your memoirs, write about the journey you’ve made so far this school year. Each student should write one or two pages about the journey you’ve made from September to today. When all the memoirs are finished, read through and think about ways to organize your 1-2 page chapters into sections. Maybe one group wrote about how they felt entering this grade level from the one you were in last year. That could be the first section of your classroom memoir. Organize the classroom memoirs so that students who wrote about the same theme or the same experience are arranged together in the same section. Publish your class memoirs and share the collection with others in your school. C. Additional Activities 1. Define Zion. Start with what the word Zion means to you. Write your definition in the middle of a poster board or large piece of paper. Next, look through each section of Searching for Zion. What
32
MosaicMagazine.org
does Zion mean to the people Raboteau encounters while she is in Israel, in Jamaica, in Ethiopia, in Ghana, and in the American South? What, ultimately, does Zion mean for the author herself? Write each character’s definition in the area around your own. Finally, look up the word Zion in the dictionary, and put that definition on your poster, too. Decorate your work with small maps of each country mentioned in the book. Go online to print images of more famous people, like Rita Marley, who define Zion in the book. If you have room, you might want to print the lyrics to Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” or use markers to write President Barack Obama’s quote about Moses and Joshua. Display your work in the class.
II. Israel A. Topics for Discussion 1. Look on page 17. When did the El Al probing, during which Raboteau was strip searched, occur? Were you surprised when you learned that the search took place before 9-11 and not after? 2. On page 18, Raboteau uses the term “light-skinned privileges.” What is light-skinned privilege? What is white privilege? How does each form of privilege impact the Black community? 3. Re-read the paragraphs about Raboteau’s father’s unpublished letter to the New York Times on page 19. Was the bias attack during which the author was cut by a beer bottle un-American? Or, was the stranger’s assault against Raboteau quintessentially American? B. Essay Idea The Biblical story of Ham was used to justify slavery in this country. Re-read what Raboteau says about Ham on page 35. Do more research on this Old Testament story. What do you think about the way American slaveholders misused the story of Ham to say that Black people were cursed by God and would always be slaves? Write an essay that summarizes the Biblical story, provides evidence of the misuse of this Biblical story to justify slavery in the United States, and expresses your opinion of the way Christians misused the Bible to justify slavery in this country.
MosaicMagazine.org
33
C. Additional Activities 1. Re-read the paragraph on page 21 about the Hurricane Katrina benefit concert when Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” on live TV. Do you remember that moment?: http://mosl.it/16nXYLm As you watch the video, think about the way Kanye West appears to be breathing. Listen to the way he is speaking. How do you think he feels? How did you feel in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Express those feelings – yours, Kanye’s, everyone’s – through art. Write a poem, draw a picture, compose a song, or make a collage. Does George Bush care about Black people? Answer that important question through the work you produce. 2. Look up Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, endings, and transitions. Research this mythological creature and his place at the gate or doorway. Next, look up Legba, the African Orisha who, like Janus, stands at the crossroad. (Orishas are spiritual entities that are honored and celebrated in religions like Obeah, Voudoun, and Candomble.) How are these important entities similar? In what ways are they different? Using images and keywords that you get from magazines or online sources, create a poster that depicts both Janus and Papa Legba. On one side of the poster, show the ways they are different, and on the other side show the ways they are the same. 3. Research the history of Sephardic Jews. Start with Raboteau’s summary on pages 34-35, but also use other sources to conduct your research. Create a timeline that examines their history in Ethiopia, which goes back thousands of years, and their less than 100 years of experience in Israel. Think about ways to express your ideas regarding slavery, war, and occupation as you develop your timeline. 4. Research the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Create a timeline that examines the history of Zionism in Israel. Think about ways to express your ideas regarding displacement, war, and occupation as you develop your timeline.
34
MosaicMagazine.org
III. Jamaica A. Topics for Discussion 1. On page 104, Raboteau’s friend Thomas Glave says, “Zion is a myth, Emily.” Do you agree or disagree? Can Zion be real? If so, where is it? 2. On page 103, Glave says homophobia expresses a rage that is rooted in “inequality of wealth.” Do you think bias against people in the LGBTQ community is greater in low-income areas? If so, why? 3. Look at Raboteau’s summary of Dispensationalism on pg. 107. What do you think of this Biblical interpretation? B. Essay Idea Think about an aspect of your identity that you cherish. Maybe it’s your religion. Perhaps it’s your love of a certain sport, artist, or type of music. Maybe it’s your relationship with your grandmother. Now, imagine having to hide that aspect of yourself. Write an essay that identifies the part of you that you hold dear. Explore the ramifications of veiling or hiding that essential piece of yourself from the world. For example, if you can’t stop drawing on paper, imagine not being able to doodle where anyone, even your family members, could see you creating art – or even see the art that you produce. Let’s say you have a special closeness with your sibling. Imagine not being able to let anyone see you express your love for your own sister or brother. What would it do to you to be forced to be “in the closet” about some aspect of yourself? C. Additional Activities 1. Read this Mosaic magazine interview with Thomas Glave: http://mosl.it/16nYJUE. Go to the J-FLAG site (www.jflag.org), and read what you can about the organization Glave co-founded. Seek other sources to explore the issue of homophobia in Jamaica. Design a website that promotes the writer and his work as a LGBTQ activist. Continue on page 47
MosaicMagazine.org
35
searching for zion
excerpt
Continued from page 29 asked, genuinely concerned. “Why does he let you travel alone?” “I’m not married,” I answered, a little too forcefully. Who was this guy to tell me I couldn’t ride the dirt-cheap public bus to Zion? I told him I didn’t need my boyfriend’s permission to travel. “Then surely he must not know how many thieves from Jamaica are in Shashemene,” Fekadu chided. “What are you going there to study? Marijuana? Ha!” I didn’t laugh. I was growing more cheerless the closer we drew to my destination. July in Ethiopia was surprisingly cold and damp and I hadn’t packed for such weather. Now my sinuses were swelling, my throat felt sore, and I had a slight cough. Either out of pity, or to make up for being a little judgmental, Fekadu shared his breakfast of injera and wat. We lurched along the rain-slicked highway past fields of teff, barley, wheat, and corn, and Dutchowned plantations growing long-stemmed roses for the flower auctions of Europe. Along the way I learned he was a cameraman for Addis TV, on his way to record footage for a story about the adverse effects of the Dutch fertilizers upon the land and the lungs of the Ethiopian workers employed in the greenhouses. The land was sick, Fekadu said, and so were the people. “Have you ever been assigned to film a story about the Rastas?” I asked him. “They have a stupid religion,” he scoffed. “When your deity is not happy with deification, you’ve got problems.” He said he was unaware of anything positive the Rasta community had done for Shashemene, just as the bajaj driver whom I flagged to deliver me into its heart had never heard of my hotel, the Zion Train Lodge. When I got off the bus I had to disagree with Fekadu. Shashemene was more than a truck stop. It was a bustling market town of one hundred thousand people, a
36
MosaicMagazine.org
good number of whom were hustling along the crowded main street where donkeys mixed with traffic, impervious to the rain shower. The driver zipped me around in his blue covered motorcycle dodging raindrops, trucks, and market women burdened with loads of firewood. There were restaurants, a post office, and an Internet café. These businesses looked sad through the mask of the rain, but so did everything. Shashemene was just a trading post at the time of its foundation and it remains a hardscrabble, slapdash place. The town sits at a crossroads in the Rift Valley along an old trade route where spices, coffee, ivory, gold, and slaves were once carried. A railway ran along this route during the Menelik II era, between Addis Ababa and Djibouti on the Red Sea coast. Later, during the Italian occupation from 1935 to 1941, Shashemene was used as a garrison. “Zion, Zion?” my driver asked the locals with increasing frustration. As we crossed a bridge spanning a dirty river, I began to wonder if there was such a place, if I’d imagined making a reservation, or if the hotel had simply shut down. The good people of Shashemene were shooing us out of town toward another place called Jamaica. That much, I understood. We followed their directions north along the main road for fifteen minutes and finally found the sign for the hotel propped on a pole the height of a gallows. The driver dumped me alongside it with my luggage and a look of condolence. The rain gave no sign of quitting any time soon and, like a putz, I’d left my umbrella next to Fekadu on the bus. I looked up. Midday, and it felt like twilight. Bats would have fit the scene. The Zion Train Lodge’s sign was in three languages—English, Amharic, and Orominya, for we were in Oromia Province. I looked down. The hotel was not beneath it. Nor was this sign in Shashemene proper but on its outskirts next to a gas station in the neighborhood of Melka Udo, which was, inarguably, a
truck stop. The hotel was nowhere in sight. It was down a narrow road lined by huts made of wattle and daub the color of dung. In front of the huts half-starved dogs with skin diseases and distended nipples mixed with angelfaced children who were dressed in rags and had snot coming out of their noses. They seemed unbothered by the rain. Not one of them had on shoes. “Farengi, farengi! Money!” they shouted with glee. They wore Coptic crosses on black strings around their necks to protect them from bad spirits and the evil eye, which, it is believed, has the power to transform people into hyenas in the night. Some of them pantomimed at their stomachs to indicate hunger. Some of them, practically babies themselves, balanced babies on their hips. Some of them stopped playing soccer with a battered moldy calabash to approach me. I knew the rule not to give directly to begging children but to the organizations put in place to serve them. I knew that one such local organization, the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community (JRDC), sought philanthropic donations for its kindergarten and elementary school, but I didn’t know yet whether that school served any of these children, who were habesha, native Ethiopians. I swiftly calculated how much money I had on me and how I might divide it among so many. There was no way. There were fifteen of them, then twenty, then forty. They came pouring out of the huts to gaze at me, the farengi, the foreigner, looking forlorn with my wet hair plastered down my back. A group of girls giggled at me and I knew I would have giggled at the sight of me too; that it was not malicious but rather inquisitive laughter. Their laughter was infectious, and laughing with them, I curtsied to make them laugh louder. If I’d known how to juggle, I would have. Whether or not I looked like a white woman didn’t matter to me. I forgot, momentarily, that I felt sick. I was playing a goofy game with a bunch of kids, and laughing with them in the rain made me feel good.
Aside from the Antarctic peninsula, this was the most foreign land I’d ever traveled. I wasn’t from here and I couldn’t pretend to be one of its people any more than I could pretend to be an Adélie penguin. This obvious discovery didn’t make me sad like I’d felt, to varying degrees, in Jerusalem and Kingston. How could I feel sad about my feelings of homelessness in the joyful asmari bets of Addis Ababa, the ancient stellae fields of Axum, the cryptic churches of Lalibela, or in the presence of these children? They crept closer, daring each other to see who might come nearest, and I loved them for their daring. Finally, the boldest boy grabbed my suitcase and I followed him, thankful that he hadn’t run off with my belongings and trusting that he knew the way. My escort led me down the muddy road for at least a quarter mile, my suitcase bumping against his skinny legs with every step. He had a shaved head and looked to be eleven or twelve, though he might have been fourteen and malnourished. “Are you here for His Majesty’s birthday?” the boy asked in halting English. He must have been used to Rasta tourists and settlers who revered Haile Selassie as the living god. “Yes,” I said, though more than that I was there to witness how the Rastas reconciled their reverence for the emperor with the dark matter of his dictatorship. That Friday, the twenty-third of July, Haile Selassie would have turned 118 years old if he had gone on living. The Rastas do not believe he died. Because he is their Messiah, the day of his birth is a high holiday, like Christmas. And they believe that, like Christ, he will come again. They maintain that Haile Selassie disappeared one day in 1975 when the Derg announced his death. Many Rastas, including Bob Marley’s widow, Rita Marley, were present a quarter century later at the ceremony in Addis Ababa where Haile Selassie’s bones were reburied in a state funeral. Citing the fact that the coffin was too large for the King of Kings, who barely cleared five feet, the Rastas refused to accept the corpse as his. Officials claimed the remains were contained in a smaller
MosaicMagazine.org
37
box within the oversized coffin, but the Rastas insist the bones were too long to belong to the emperor, Elect of God, Lord of Lords, Defender of the Faith—man of many titles. “Bones lie,” they said. I followed the boy past the carcass of a donkey, its stomach being devoured by birds of prey. The donkey’s innards were marbled with fat; its intestines were stretched in the beaks of the birds. We turned left at a desolate cornfield and then right onto a narrower, muddier pathway. Somewhere along that track, the mud sucked off one of my shoes. It was then I feared I’d made a mistake in coming to Shashemene. This was the Promised Land the Rastas dreamed of? The relentless rain combined with the obvious poverty made this Zion appear despairing. Of all the remote places I’d ever been, it reminded me most of Cooter, Missouri. I stopped in Cooter once in my college days on a road trip to New Orleans, drawn off the interstate on a whim by the name on the side of the town’s rusty water tower. A black boy, not much older than this one, spotted my Jersey license plates and begged me to bring him along so that he could have a crack at something other than a backbreaking sharecropper’s life. Not even Cooter was as dispiriting as this. Finally we came to a dead end and stopped before a tall wooden gate. Its doors were painted with twin guardian angels wielding swords. Soaking wet and shivering in the cold with mud up to my ankles, I looked at the boy for a clue. “Zion,” he announced, smiling brightly, dropping my suitcase in a puddle, scratching a scab on his scalp, and holding out his hand for a tip. I gladly paid him this, along with the granola bar in my sweatshirt pocket and a hug that surely benefited me more than it did him. Then I rang the bell and the gates opened into what I can only describe as Swiss Family Robinson meets the circus. The Zion Train Lodge was an explosion of color. Every-
38
MosaicMagazine.org
thing that could be painted had been painted red, green, and gold—the colors of the Ethiopian flag. Three round Sidamo-style guesthouses with bamboo walls and pointy grass roofs sprouted like mushrooms amid jacarandas, tiki torches, hot-pink hibiscus blossoms, and banana trees strung with hammocks made of hemp. Fat orange marigolds surrounded a vegetable garden bursting with radishes, tomatoes, and squash. To the right a small stable sheltered two donkeys, two goats, a brown horse, and a large round mound of hay. To the left, a guard snored in a watchtower that looked more like a tree house. In the center of the property, a caramel-colored boy with blondish dreadlocks practiced driving a carriage, drawn by a white horse, in circles, jingling the bells of the harness and shouting commands in French like a little lord. The canopy of the carriage was brightly painted with the likeness of Haile Selassie and Empress Menen in their ornate gold crowns and embroidered robes. There they were again decked out in their imperial regalia on the concrete water tank at the back of the property next to a chicken coop. The tank fueled an outdoor shower near a pair of red, green, and gold doghouses painted with the words ROOTS and CULTURE. I assumed these were the names of the two yellow dogs chasing after the boy in the carriage. Compared to the feral canines on the other side of the gate, these two were fat and happy. It occurred to me that, like Noah’s ark, there were two of every animal on the property of the Zion Train Lodge. So where was the captain of this ship? I picked my way through the flora to the main house and found the proprietors inside. Ras Alex, from the island of Guadeloupe, was a rail-thin black man with dreadlocks so long they brushed the floor. Sister Sandrine, his French wife, was a composed woman with porcelain skin, close-set blue eyes, and no eyebrows. In her white head-wrap she reminded me of Vermeer’s subject in Girl with a Pearl Earring, aged twenty years. Their English was far better than my French. I came to understand from Sister Sandrine that several other guests would be arriving from France that evening for the holiday weekend, and from Ras Alex that the
four-year-old hotel was the fulfillment of his dream to reach the Promised Land.
of the two? Could the return to Zion, as one dream fulfilled, become an end in and of itself?
“Get on board the Zion train,” he said as he welcomed me, pulling the chord of an imaginary steam whistle and tooting twice.
“Êtes-vous journaliste?” Ras Alex asked drily.
I told Ras Alex I thought it was a good catchphrase for his business and he nodded in appreciation. There were three other families in Shashemene from the francophone Caribbean, he counted, only fifteen people in total. They were a small minority in the Rasta community, which was itself a small minority, totaling only about two hundred permanent settlers (double that if you count the impermanent ones and triple that if you count the visitors who swooped in for high holidays such as this). He hoped more settlers would repatriate from Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Barths in time so that he could be more easily understood. Today he was joyful that his older sister’s family would be among the other guests arriving. They lived in Paris but were building a house on the property next to the Zion Train Lodge. So whatever the state of the Rastafarian settlement at large, Ras Alex’s homestead was steadily growing. Shashemene was not only a home for blacks, he assured me, gesturing to his white wife. According to the couple’s reasoning, Ethiopia was the cradle of humankind and therefore the shared ancestral home of every race. All of us descended from this Eden. Ras Alex wondered if I had visited the basement of Addis Ababa’s National Museum to pay my regards to the hominid Lucy, whose bones were three million years old. I had. And was I a Rasta? I admitted I was not. Then what, he asked me, was I doing in Shashemene?
“No,” I hedged. I wasn’t a journalist. I didn’t know exactly how to describe my role. Skeptical of my aims, Ras Alex showed me a newspaper clipping from the French Courrier International and a short Italian newsreel, both of which ridiculed the Rastas’ exodus, portraying them at best as outdated tribalists and at worst as clowns. Who in their right mind, these dispatches questioned, would emigrate to Ethiopia? Ras Alex said I was welcome here, but it would lie on my conscience how I chose to depict them. I understood what he was trying to tell me. He thought of me as a reporter and, as such, an agent of Babylon. “Je suis un chercheur qui écrit,” I attempted. That seemed about right. I am a seeker who writes. ★
SEARCHING FOR ZION © 2013 by EMILY RABOTEAU; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove/ Atlantic, Inc.
“I want to know if this is the home you dreamed it would be,” I explained. How were the Rastas who settled here accepted by Ethiopians and to what extent had they integrated into larger society? What impact did an actual, physical repatriation have on Rasta notions of Zion? Was Zion a state of mind? A physical reality? A combination
MosaicMagazine.org
39
Nicole, Age Seven --for Nicole Reid
Why he got you here pretending to be human? Why he think we need your hushed voice warning us that we can’t answer imperfection, can’t tame it? Why he groom us to let you go and why spirit got to be barely a sprout, younger than most anything planted in the harvest field, holding some spindle of autumn— twigs and stems spun olive or golden or auburn— in her hands? Why send something more fragile than iceglass or worn sheets? Why kindle your plain logic—put it in your heart to sit near picture windows when storms rise, call the ancestors claiming them, whispering everything most won’t hear—all the world and all that frightens me in it? Why he got to make sure we know we’re a stone’s throw from oblivion, reminding us every time you turn our corner, God so big even his smallest things sparkle like a million silver coins?
Remica L. Bingham
40
MosaicMagazine.org
Kuperberg, South Side Street Photo
The little boy in Anna’s photo shines like the little boy we’ve been searching for, found last night in the last place we wanted him: the backseat of the white truck, shell casings littering the floor. In the photo, he is watching for someone outside the shot, his mouth full with sugary sweet eaten whole, only the stick poking through pursed lips. His eyes are wide. In the truck, the boy’s eyes are perpetually wide. The children, in the photo, are perched on a stoop, not far from the stoop where the boy in the truck used to play tag and hunt, chase girls with unraveling plaits, like the girl behind the boy in the photo. The boy in the truck could have been the boy taken in a flash. But time is only still here, in the photo, no one captures the uncertain space behind the waiting door.
Remica L. Bingham
MosaicMagazine.org
41
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. February 20, 2013 - In celebration of Black History Month, Ron Kavanaugh (r), publisher of Mosaic, had the pleasure of hosting a reading and conversation with writers Bernice L. McFadden (l) & Courttia Newland. Both Akashic Books’s authors were celebrating the release of their respective books Nowhere Is A Place, which is a re-release, and The Gospel According to Cane. The event was held at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn as part of its BHM programs. After several releases in his country, England, this is Courttia’s first U.S. release. Bernice has released nine works of fiction reflecting early to mid-twentieth century life of Blacks in America.
For additional “Around Town” coverage of literary events visit MosaicMagazine.org
June 20, 2013 - Amir “Questlove” Thompson, of The Roots, his trusty afropic by his side, signed copies of his new memoir Mo Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove at PowerHouse Arena in Bklyn, NY. Prior to the signing he sat for a conversation with the book’s co-author and journalist Ben Greenman.
42
MosaicMagazine.org
April 29, 2013 - The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, now in its ninth year, continues to explore bravery in arts and politics. The opening night event, which was held at The Cooper Union in New York City, got off to a rousing start. An audience member heckled Salman Rushdie during his opening remarks. Salman, whose explicative vocab is far broader than one might imagine, won the brief skirmish, returned to form, and completed with his remarks. Readers included A. Igoni Barrett (right), David Frakt, Darrel Vandeveld, Joy Harjo, Jamaica Kincaid, Ursula Krechel, Earl Lovelace, Vaddey Ratner, Mikhail Shishkin, and Najwan Darwish. The digitally ubiquitous Baratunde Thurston performed host duties. According to its website, PEN was founded in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers everywhere; to emphasize the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; to fight for freedom of expression; and to act as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned, and sometimes killed for their views - See more at: www.pen.org.
July 10, 2013 - Kweli Journal hosted “Set the Page Afire” an annual fundraiser slash writer’s conference at the new Brooklyn space Dumbo Sky. The jazz/fusion group SoNuvo performed and accompanied poets Rachel Eliza Griffiths (below), Amber Atiya, Vincent Toro and Naomi Extra. Attendees enjoyed music, poetry, refreshments and a beautiful view of New York City. To support Kweli go to www.kwelijournal.org.
MosaicMagazine.org
43
reviews him, the America expert, who so easily said ‘graduate school’ instead of ‘postgraduate school.’ And so she began to dream. She saw herself in a house from The Cosby Show, in a school with students holding notebooks miraculously free of wear and crease.” In a matter of paragraphs, Ifem is holding her visa and giving away her clothing. Their love will be put on hold for decades— they will love others, but always return to thoughts of each other. America is a cruel teacher to Ifem, who finds herself poor and put into a variety of dangerous situations. Through hard work and some luck, she makes her way in America. Adichie shows Ifem’s transition from a lost girl to an “Americanah.” Ifem, in a contemporary twist, starts to blog about race, a concept she had never considered when living in Nigeria. Racial disparities only becoming obvious to her as an “African” in the U.S. Adichie speaks about this new take on her own identity in her famous TED talk, which has been viewed over four million times on social media, confessing that she never considered herself “African” until moving to the U.S. and playing Mariah Carey for her friends when they ask to hear her “tribal music.” Ifem finds herself in myriad situations, cringeworthy to an American reader, that parallel her creator’s, and so she finds her voice as an anonymous blogger. Several paragraphs end with a blog post so the reader can get an opportunity to hear from Ifem in the first person. Though the first few times the blog posts appear they feel tossed at the end of the chapter, the reader comes to appreciate their presence as the blog, “Raceteenth” or “Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black”, becomes a more important part of Ifem’s life and work. Though by the end of her time in the America Ifem has it all—an African-American boyfriend who happens to be a professor at Yale, a blog that supports her financially, a fellowship at Princeton—she realizes that she has lost her sense of self and wants to return to Nigeria.
44
MosaicMagazine.org
The thread of her love for Obinze is never lost. Even though he is married, it is his pull that strengthens her desire to return to her home. She struggles with her reentry and finds Lagos to be overwhelming to her senses, she has a new identity as an Americanah—she eventually feels comfortable there again. Late in the novel she realizes, “I’m really home. I’m home. She no longer sent Ranyinudo texts about what to do—Should I buy meat in Shoprite or send Iyabo to the market? Where should I buy hangers? Now she awoke to the sound of the peacocks, and got out of bed, with the shape of her day familiar and her routines unthinking.” Though their love is complicated, Adichie’s novel makes us root for these adults who maintain the love they felt as teenagers. Once Ifem knows who she is, she is able to bring a mature, strong identity to any relationship. Adichie has created characters that readers will be talking about long after they finish their journey together.
Daughters Who Walk This Path by Yejide Kilanko Pintail, Penguin Group USA Review by Leigh Cuen In her debut novel, Nigerian-born Yejide Kilanko conjures a family of women growing up and becoming mothers in Nigeria. A series of interwoven stories connect these women’s emotional strength, the complexities of prejudice, and the network of support between mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. Kilanko manages to make this empowering feminist narrative natural and personal rather than ideological. The story begins in Ibadan, a city in southwest Nigeria. It is the early 1980s and Morayo, the young daughter of a middle class salesman and a seamstress, welcomes her baby sister into the family. “That was the day that afin [pejorative term for albino] exploded into my life,” Kilanko writes. Relatives accuse Morayo’s mother of allowing evil spirits to enter the womb and make baby Enjayo pale-skinned. This is Morayo’s first encounter with discrimination with in her culture. Her mother teaches her how to love her new sister, Enjayo, and ignore superstitions. As they grow, Enjayo’s companionship becomes “as familiar and welcome as the sun in the sky.” They explore all the daily adventures of childhood, peppered with the sights, smells, tastes and landscape of Ibadan, golden balls of fried akara, guava trees and brilliantly colored fabrics. Until one day an older male cousin, Bros T, sneaks into Morayo’s bedroom and rapes her with such physical and emotional brutality that Morayo feels her spirit floating away from her body and gazing down with horror at a familiar face on the bed below. “Her terror-filled eyes stared away into nothingness,” Kilanko writes, “her mouth open wide in a silent scream.” The secret sexual abuse and the torment of her cousin’s intimidation and threats, become an invisible wall between Morayo and her family, especially her mother
and sister. Morayo grows increasingly isolated. On the cusp of puberty, the once vivacious, carefree child sinks into despair. She has a miscarriage in her early teens. Later she learns that other women in her family experienced similar violence, sexually assaulted by male family friends or relatives, and one of her family members are products of these rapes. Then the histories of different characters begin to interweave. Kilanko does a remarkable job of including multiple perspectives and narratives without losing focus or confusing the reader. Her dialogue is clever and believable. Her book is simultaneously thought provoking, incredibly complex, and yet effortless to read. The journey’s become circular, alluding to the cycles of human experience. In one such scene, a mother tells her wounded daughter that facing the truth and surviving is remarkably courageous, that the women who came before her love her and will support her: “We are the strong women of Omu.” Together, these valiant women navigate their way through traditional cultures in transition, war, corrupt local politics, cross-cultural relationships, lost love, workplace discrimination, motherhood, illness, and natural disasters. Kilanko has built a narrative that transcends location and time by combining the overlapping stories of many characters, which undergo similar dramatic change in different places and distinct times across Nigeria, from urban to traditional communities, and all the grey spaces in between in post-colonial Nigeria. At the same times, all the characters are rooted in the same bloodline and the same home, forming a single braided narrative. In this way the lives of the characters, the choices they make and the struggles they face, are constantly in immediate contact with reflective stories from the surrounding women. The book slowly adds layers until the entire plot
MosaicMagazine.org
45
is a kaleidoscope of eloquent memories telling a similar story, with exquisite variations. Each chapter opens with a proverb, and includes occasional quotes from books that inspire the different characters, framing her novel in an inter-textual sphere, the connections between cycles lies at the heart of her tale.
The House Girl by Tara Conklin William Morrow, HarperCollins Publishers Review by Leigh Cuen On a Virginia plantation in 1852, a teenage slave stashes several of the exquisite artworks she painted in an improvised sack, as she secretly plots her escape. In 2004 New York, an ambitious lawyer at a prestigious law firm is given the biggest case of her young career —a reparations lawsuit to acknowledge the horrors of slavery. The House Girl hinges on interconnected stories, told through memories, art criticism, and letters, and tells a tale of love, art and freedom. In her debut novel, Tara Conklin layers the stories of two young opposites. Lina Sparrow is “a twenty-first century white girl from New York,” the daughter of a successful artist, a recent law school graduate who is hungry for success. Josephine Bell is a house slave in the rural South, abused by her “owners,” and forced to serve an ailing barren wife, Lu Anne Bell, who looks the other way and quietly allows Josephine to use a dusty library full of art supplies and forgotten books. After her death, Josephine’s mistress, Lu Anne Bell, becomes recognized as a groundbreaking American artist. Her heirs, a powerful Southern family controls the collection of artworks in Lu Anne’s estate. But her acclaim is challenged when several historians and art experts reveal that it may have been the slave, not the mistress, who created these masterpieces.
46
MosaicMagazine.org
When Lina is charged with finding a candidate who can sustain a media-worthy lawsuit claiming $6.2 trillion in unpaid wages and crimes against humanity he begins a search that will mine her family’s history, the lingering financial benefits of slavery, and race in America. Lina’s ability to find evidence of the slavery-contemporary plaintiff connection proved fruitless There few complete records of the slaves she is asked to investigate. A chance conversation with her father, an art dealer, finally provides tangible clues to the Josephine Bell and Lu Anne Bell connection. Conklin says she never planned to write a novel about art, race, slavery, or gender. The book began as a series of short stories about a white “slave doctor” named Caleb Harper, traipsing across the Antebellum South with a runaway love. In the course of her research, she discovers that there is no easy way to track AfricanAmerican ancestry. Only a select few historic plantations maintained any records that slaves once lived there. “Perhaps these things should not have surprised me,” says Conklin, “But they did.” The scant historical accounts of slaves she found described rampant brutality. She felt overwhelmed by magnitude of raw, untold history. Conklin drew from her experience as a lawyer to create Lina, a modern character with the privilege and the determination to unravel an untold story. Caleb Harper, became a supporting character in a larger story about a single slave and her humanity. Visual art is the perfect medium through which her characters communicate across centuries and space to express emotions. As the legal investigation grows more complex, art collides with undiscovered truths. Her father’s surprising new art exhibit forces her to confront the mother she never knew in a series of 18 vibrant and layered portraits. Lina realizes that her father’s art holds a hidden message. For the first time, Lina watches her mother’s image smile, scream, laugh, cry and take on distorted, surrealist proportions. Lina is forced to look at her past in colorful, inanimate frames that reach far beyond the
borders of her comfort. Conversely, Josephine experiences art as a medium for exploring both her world and her fantasies. She creates portraits of other slaves, where they live, and the world beyond their grasp. Her paintings reflect the lovely, peaceful landscapes depicted in books in the estate’s library, the swirling blues and grays of the ocean, complex graphs that measure the shape and volume of waves. Josephine thinks in pictures. When Josephine wonders where her mother is buried, she imagines a woman’s body carved into a valley and mountaintops, her hair made of clouds. By wrapping these two personal journeys together, Conklin has created a helix of art, history, relationships, and a fictitious legal investigation. The author bravely breathes personality and warmth into the harsh tales of race, injustice and freedom in American history. ★
2. Research Rastafarianism. Create a visual collage that expresses the main tenets of this religion.
IV. Ethiopia A. Topics for Discussion 1. Re-read pages 124-125 and consider the influence Civil Rights had on Ethiopian activists like Professor Ashete. Were you surprised to learn that African Americans inspired student uprisings in Africa? Do you think African Americans still inspire political activism around the world? What do you think most people around the world think of African American culture today? 2. Re-read the story about two men with swords on page 135. What does Earth mean when she says, “they both belong to me”? 3. Re-read the last two paragraphs on page 165. What is Babylon? What do you think the bonfire symbolizes? B. Essay Idea Re-read Mr. Ford’s definition of himself on page 134. How would you define yourself if you had to use places to tell who you are? Write an essay that explains your way of identifying self through place. C. Additional Activities 1. Re-read the 2nd to the last paragraph on page 161. Who should our African American saints be? Harriet Tubman? Fannie Lou Hamer? Stokely Carmichael? Jon Huggins? What about our grandmothers, local community leaders, and teachers? Create a poster of 6 women and 6 men who you think have done the most to liberate African Americans. 2. Research Haile Selasie. Create a timeline that depicts his reign in Ethiopia. What did he do to benefit Ethiopians? What he did that harmed the country?
MosaicMagazine.org
47
Advertise Feature your ad in the next print edition. Email info@ mosaicmagazine.org to reserve your placement. Click here for details. AD RATES: B&W/Color Full Page: $150/$200 Cover 2 or 3: $175/$250 Back Cover: $175/$250 Spread: $200/$350 Center Spread: $250/$400 Ad-design service available: $50
Deadline: October 1 Available: October 15 PRINT SPECS Average Print Run: 500 Paid Subscriptions: 300 (13% are libraries) Total Circulation: 450 Frequency: Tri-annual 8 1/2 X 11” Distributors: PDG Group
48
MosaicMagazine.org
V. Ghana A. Topics for Discussion 1. Re-read the paragraphs examining slavery within the continent of Africa from pages 216 to 218. Did you know that slavery still exists on the continent? How does this make you feel? 2. What does Raboteau mean on page 220 when she says that Europeans didn’t think of themselves as European and Africans didn’t think of themselves as African? 3. What do you think of the way Elolo describes African Americans and their disdain for Africa on pages 222 – 223? How are African immigrants treated by African Americans in this country? B. Essay Idea Research contemporary slavery in Africa. Write a report that examines this problem, including efforts to eradicate slavery. Is slavery in Africa today different from the way slavery was in the United States? Or, is slavery slavery, no matter where it practiced? C. Additional Activities 1. Study the African-American leader W.E.B. DuBois. Create a list of his major accomplishments. Use images from magazines or online sources to show what DuBois did in this country.
Additional Reading Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now Stacey Anne Chin, The Other Side of Paradise Ato Solomon Hailemariam, The Young Crusader Teresa Ann Willis, Like a Tree Without Roots Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, Powder Necklace Catherine McKinley, Indigo Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is Nowhere
power in East Africa in the early twentieth century? Vassanji: I had to research details of the resistances to German colonialism in Tanganyika; Islam in the country, including the populist version known as Sufism or tarika; the Swahili poetry tradition, and how the utenzi long form was used to write history; and I had to research the practice of magic. I also consulted the newspaper archives in the library at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and I visited Kilwa in Tanzania (where I saw some old graves and met a medicine man). I ordered quite a number of books over the Internet. Reynolds: Can you share a little about the process in which you approach a literary project, what comes first: the story or a particular character you want to convey a message through? Are the intriguing subplots there at the beginning and how much of a challenge is it to find a way to bring them all together? Vassanji: Sometimes, it’s hard to remember. I think I had the town of Kilwa in mind, having read about it. It has a certain romance to it, being ancient. It’s one of the oldest urban settlements in sub-Saharan Africa. The Arab traveler Ibn Batuta mentions it in the fourteenth century; the English poet John Milton mentions it. It’s older than Delhi. Its descriptions in old Portuguese texts are fantastic. Then there was the mystique of magic— which is very strong in Tanzania. I got fascinated by Swahili culture, and the people we used to call halfcaste or chotara. And I needed someone to return to his hometown and examine what happens to him. There are many wealthy doctors in Canada, I sent one of them back.
Vassanji: Nonfiction can give us important data and firsthand descriptions (which need not always be accurate!). Fiction has its own logic, I believe, and I believe can get to a deeper truth about people, revealing inner lives, ambiguities, the conflicts, the grey areas. In this book, Kamal’s Indian uncle is a racist in statements; yet he takes pride in his ancestor having fought alongside Africans in their resistance to colonialism and having been hanged for it; and he gets the best tutor for Kamal, who goes on to become a doctor. How would a social scientist’s clean categories handle him? Reynolds: Before you became an acclaimed novelist, you were a nuclear physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Talk about shifting gears. How long were you a scientist and did you always have the desire to become a writer? Vassanji: I did my bachelor’s at MIT and my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. I worked as a physicist for ten years in Canada. During that time, I began to write short stories and my first novel. I always read a lot, and I enjoyed writing. The actual decision was to begin to write seriously—to finish something, and start something new. I gave myself that purpose. Reynolds: You mentioned that one of the things you learned as a scientist that carried over to your being a writer was the sense of discipline. Can you further explain? Vassanji: Scientists work hard and don’t give up once the pursuit for something starts. I also don’t give up. I give myself a purpose, and however long the writing takes, and however many twists and turns it takes, I finish it. ★
Reynolds: How important of a role can contemporary literature play as a vehicle for exploring the history of people of mixed racial identity and ethnic culture that were—and still may be—prominent in Africa and the Caribbean, as opposed to that history being chronicled in nonfiction text?
MosaicMagazine.org
49
THE WORK OF
SAVE THE DATE
11.16.13
50
MosaicMagazine.org
August Wilson Mosaic
Literary Conference
IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY TO INVEST IN A GOOD THING. Introducing Better FuturesTM —a whole new kind of investment with a greater return than money. When you invest, it helps kids go to college. Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste but a wonderful thing to invest in.TM ©2013 UNCF
MosaicMagazine.org Invest in Better Futures at UNCF.ORG/INVEST
51
. e v i G
ity il b a r u o in a t s us su lp e h l il w 0 1 $ ift of ams. g r g A o . r u p o y d t e u s o a h b turehis wit a t r e o t li d ’t p n lo a e c v e e .org d W e d in n z a a s g r a e it m r ic w a s .mo lished w b u w p w t n e s e r p to
52
MosaicMagazine.org