Mosaic Literary Magazine #25

o s a ic i c M ISSUE 25 Summer 2009 mosaicmagazine.org

RELEVANT LITERATURE

THOMAS GLAVE EDUCATOR LESSON PLANS LAWRENCE HILL GODS & SOLDIERS

Six dollars

1

MosaicBooks.com the quintessential place for booklovers

CLARITY OF VISION For over thirteen years, MosaicBooks.com has served the African-American book community with information and previews of contemporary books.

Our commitment to book clubs has garnered a national following and made us an important voice for writers and publishers. Thanks!

And as we move forward, MosaicBooks.com will offer unique and exciting services that will keep you informed, networked, and well read.

Best, Ron Kavanaugh The MosaicBooks.com Team

2

mosaicmagazine.org

content #25 Interview Thomas Glave by Vincent F.A. Golphin ..................................................... 8 Lawrence Hill by Maranda Moses ........................................................... 14 Excerpt Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill ........................................... 22 Mosaic Lesson Plans ................................................................................... 25 New lesson plans for secondary-school educators Designed by Eisa Nefertari Ulen Reviews ....................................................................................................... 30 City Kid

by Nelson George Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing Edited by Rob Spillman Gospel

by Samiya Bashir Home: Social Essays

by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Midnight, A Gangster Love Story

by Sister Souljah More Than Just Race: Being Black And Poor In The Inner City

by William Julius Wilson The Other Side of Paradise

by Staceyann Chin The Torturer’s Wife

by Thomas Glave The World in Half

by Cristina Henríquez Cover photo Young girl in Birao, Central African Republic © UNICEF | Pierre Holtz The Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team (HDPT) unites all organizations working to alleviate the humanitarian and development crisis in the Central African Republic: United Nations agencies, the Red Cross Movement, NGOs and other organizations. For more information, visit www.hdptcar.net or email us at info@hdptcar.net.

3

Editor & Publisher Ron Kavanaugh ron@mosaicmagazine.org facebook.com/mosaicbooks Twitter: @mosaicbooks Copy Editor Tawny Pruitt

Mosaic Literary Magazine (ISSN 1531-0388) is published four times per year by the Literary Freedom Project. Content copyright Š 2009.

No portion of this magazine can be reprinted or reproduced in any form without prior permission from the publisher.

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 letters and comments.

Send us an e-mail, info@mosaicmagazine.org or a letter: Mosaic Literary Magazine 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463.

Please visit Mosaicmagazine.org for submission guidelines.

Colophon Layout Software: Adobe InDesign CS Graphic Software: Paint Shop Pro 12 Mast Typeface: Zanzibar Regular Editorial Typeface: Zapf Humanist Computer: Dell XPS 400 POSTMASTER Please send address corrections to: Mosaic 314 W. 231 St #470 Bronx, NY 10463

Mosaic is made possible 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 was provided by Poets & Writers.

4

mosaicmagazine.org

editorial The idea of a literate society is a wonderful notion. An intelligent and progressive world where literacy is encouraged fosters a more knowledgeable and competent workforce, and promotes discussions of ideas and creativity.

But my desire for higher literacy leans to the selfish. As a publisher and editor of a literary magazine I’m dismayed by the thought of my subscriber base shrinking due to books losing relevance in popular culture. Reading may one day be relegated to the haves while others are left to find there own way in the private and often isolated spaces the Internet provides.

New to this millennium is the ability to pleasure ourselves passively and relentlessly (hmmm) —iPods, social networks, Gameboys, texting, Netflix, and more.

As the Internet and digital media grows in relevance our isolation increases. I could blame all the previously mentioned extracurriculars but I doubt reversing the trend would change much.

What has changed more than anything are expectations. We expect the Internet will fill this void. But its randomness —to find an answer you must search sites that may not have been previously vetting for authority— is its biggest handicap. Sometimes three responses will suffice, opposed to the 300 returned in a Google search. The Internet desperately needs a librarian, parent, or educator.

Someone who can find the seam between question and answer, and present it in a simple yet expository way.

Starting with this issue (page 25) Mosaic will provide assistance to education stakeholders by supplementing its editorial content with lesson plans based on the content of each issue. The lesson plans, which are developed for secondary school educators, demonstrate how Mosaic’s content can serve as a connective tool to explore various educational subjects and keep books and reading integral parts of the learning process.

I’m doing my part. What are you doing?

Ron Kavanaugh Mosaic Literary Magazine

5

6

mosaicmagazine.org

Contributors Tara Betts is the author of Arc and Hue (Aquarius Press/Willow Books). She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. Her work appears in several anthologies and journals. Tara also interviewed Kalisha Buckhanon for Mosaic’s Fall 2008 issue.

Jada Bradley (jadabradley.com) is a Washington DC-based writer who enjoys telling stories in formal and informal ways. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post and online.

Robert Fleming, a former award-winning reporter at The New York Daily News, is the author of The Wisdom of The Elders, The African-American Writer’s Handbook, Havoc After Dark, Fever In The Blood, and the editor of After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men and Intimacy. Recently, he wrote a ghost-written memoir for Bertie Bowman, a veteran U.S. Senate employee, Step By Step, with a foreword by former President Bill Clinton, published by Random House (2008). His poetry, reviews, essays and fictions have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in New York City.

Sidik Fofana has written several publication including the Source, Vibe, and allhiphop.com.

His work appears in the recently released The Black Male Handbook: Blueprint for Life edited

by Kevin Powell An assistant professor of creative writing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Vincent F. A. Golphin’s reviews, interviews, stories, essays and poems, have appeared in a wide range of magazines and journals. His most recent poetry

collection is, Like a Dry Land: A Soul’s Journey through the Middle East.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a PhD candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is also the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press (www.brokenbeautiful. wordpress.com) Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York by West Indian parents, A. Naomi Jackson is a writer of short fiction and poetry. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright grant, where she received a M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, her work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Sable Literary Magazine, and Caribbean Beat, and is forthcoming in Encyclopedia.

Maranda Moses is the author of Proud Past, Bright Future, and a contributor to the anthology Short Stuff: New English Stories from Quebec.

Her articles have appeared in the Montreal Gazette and Essence. She currently lives and works in Montreal, Canada.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning. She has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Heart & Soul, Vibe, The Source, 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.

7

by Vincent F.A. Golphin

8

mosaicmagazine.org

Bronx-born, Thomas Glave stepped onto the road to literary stardom in 1992, when he won a poetry fellowship from the local Arts Council. Yet, after the publication of two critically successful story collections, a book of essays, and a groundbreaking anthology, the Binghamton University professor says he is “just someone who writes.” His modesty clashes with what literary observers, and the Village Voice in 2000, see—a slender, soft-spoken educator as a “Writer on the Verge,” and winner of some of the highest distinctions for U.S. writers and scholars. As he ends a term in August as The Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the former Fulbright Scholar, O. Henry fiction prizewinner, and recipient of several National Endowment for the Arts fellowships travels

9

10

mosaicmagazine.org

while being immersed in an as-yet, unnamed essay collection and a novel, The Trials of Taren J. His first short story collection, Whose Son?: And Other Stories (2000), his 2005 book of essays entitled Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, the standout, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (2008), as well as a second story collection, The Torturer’s Wife (2008), display the author’s passion for rich language, his love for Jamaica (an ancestral homeland), and human rights. The scholar, author, and co-founder of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays, had recently returned from the island when he spoke with Vincent F.A. Golphin for Mosaic.

“The most important thing is just to write, not necessarily how I see myself,” Glave said. “That’s not going to do me any good with the next sentence.”

GOLPHIN: The comment reminds me of something I heard Egyptian author, psychiatrist, and human rights activist Nawal El Saadawi say about a writer’s power to change the world at the PEN International Literary Festival last March. Have you ever been struck by the power of the written word?

Photo credit: Georgia Popplewell

GLAVE: Absolutely, in terms of what I have read in other people’s writing, and the power of storytelling in general. The fact that human beings are always so captivated by stories. I am very widely read, widely influenced. I have taken in a lot of

information from a lot of people over the years that I have been writing...My parents were immigrants to the United States. Just by virtue of that experience, I had an outsider experience, to a degree, in the United States, being attached to a culture that was not of the United States, but connected in other ways geopolitically to the U.S. Well of course, the way that people in my family spoke was very different from the way the other black people we soon came to know spoke, and the way the Latino people spoke, and so on. Just that early exposure to different rhythms in language and different expressions and cultural norms and such, I think, made for a marker of difference—to actually be able to notice that people had different ways of telling stories and speaking.

GOLPHIN: When do you first remember that you marveled at the beauty in those voices?

GLAVE: Very early. Not a specific moment, but I do remember coming of age as a teenager in school, being in school, and suddenly becoming more aware—especially, since I was spending more time in Jamaica as a child—that there were very noticeable differences in how the people in my home, in my family, spoke and used language versus the way other people did. Plus, when I was younger I also had storybooks and records at that time, things that were British, like Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and Winnie the Pooh, that were

11

English, British.

I think part of that was probably tied to the fact that we came from British colonial society. Also, my parents were more comfortable with that kind of material. England was more familiar to them in that way.

I heard other accents in that kind of storytelling, and so I was aware of that early on, as well. I think that all of this is very deliberate, though. When I was younger, I couldn’t influence what people were giving me to read and to think about, but as I got older, I became very aware that I wanted to expand my knowledge as to what was out there vis-a-vis writing. I thought that would be very important for me to know that, and also very important for my work...I don’t want to live in a kind of bubble or an enclave in which I only am exposed to the stuff that is around me. I think what is around me is extremely important, but I want more than that. I want to know more about the world. That is how my imagination and my particular curiosity works.

I am always very interested in the ways that other people do things, as well. It teaches me a lot about myself, in terms of what I don’t do, but also how I choose to do things, in all kinds of ways.

GOLPHIN: For example?

GLAVE: The way that I think in terms of my openness to other kinds of cultures, what one learns from different cultures and ways of being. There are nar-

12

mosaicmagazine.org

ratives that go back thousands and thousands and thousands of years from eastern nations like China and Japan, and visual and written narratives from what is now Pakistan, India, that people just don’t even know about in the west. This is also true for most non-western nations.

GOLPHIN: Much of what you’ve just said comes through in your writing, particularly in the latest book, The Torturer’s Wife, a collection of short stories that are almost without place. There are no specific national references in most of the tales.

There are sort of oblique references to the nationalities of the characters. The locales are left to the reader’s imagination. How did you decide on such an approach to writing?

GLAVE: I have been working toward the work in this book in earlier works, although I did not necessarily know that at the time...I was very interested in looking at things that happen in the world, because I think of myself as a citizen of the world. I’ve been in places where all kinds of things, such as those described in the book, have actually happened...at the core of a lot of this is really just history. The very idea of The Torturer’s Wife itself is something that is central to any society. There are things in Words to Our Now, my book of essays, that definitely prefigure what is here.

GOLPHIN: One of the things you said in an inter-

view not long after Words to Our Now was published is that the work was an attempt to express outrage about the injustice that exists within the human condition. Has the outrage about the injustice in the world grown larger in your work?

GLAVE: That is a very interesting question, but it is a hard one to answer in respect to fiction, because I have to be very careful when I write fiction—this is very important to me—to not let my personal politics take over the narrative and the intricacies of the lives of the characters. Whatever my personal beliefs might be, I don’t want them to get in the way of what the characters actually have to do, who they are, and what they feel about things.

GOLPHIN: How do you manage to not let that happen?

GLAVE: By maintaining an interest in the characters, and really focusing on them, and not on my own politics. That was the difference between Words to Our Now, writing a book of essays and writing a book of fiction. I found myself as a fiction writer, when I came to write Words to Our Now, having to say things like, “I believe this,” or, “I feel that,” or, “It is evident to me,” in a way that I would never have done in fiction. In fiction, I was more interested in what the characters thought and how they made their way through all kinds of problems. That is one difference. I was working as a fiction writer, and not

as an essayist.

GOLPHIN: “The Torturer’s Wife” is one of two or three tales in the new book that do not deal specifically with the subject of homosexuality; yet consider some of the other stories, like “Between,” the first one in the book—can you say that drama about two gay men has no hint of you? Don’t the characters also arise from your politics or perspectives?

GLAVE: Somebody asked me a question like that about Whose Song?: And Other Stories, whether they were autobiographical...I am not sure about that...the characters in “Between” say things that I would never say. I think there is a character in “Love Them,” a short story in Whose Song?, that says things that I would never say. I know there is a character in the story, “Out There,” all the characters indeed, who do things and say things that I would never say or do. This is the thing—I am more interested in getting to know those characters and seeing how they deal with situations, and what they would do. That is one of the fascinating things I find about writing fiction, it is really different than writing essays for me, because it is such an exploration of an entirely different consciousness. Words to Our Now was also written—I guess I can say now—in what I felt was a very necessary response to the (President George W.) Bush era. The violence, the arrogance, the cruelty, all of the stuff that happened. I felt it Continued on page 47

13

by Maranda Moses

14

mosaicmagazine.org

The fictional story of heroine Aminata Diallo’s harrowing journey through the Transatlantic Slave Trade has earned author Lawrence Hill bestseller status in his native Canada. Since the release of Someone Knows My Name, Hill has received a number of accolades for his book—his seventh among a bibliography of both fiction and nonfiction publications. A former reporter, and the biracial son of American immigrants with roots in the Civil Rights Movement out of Washington, DC, Hill was a finalist for the 2008 Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award. Someone Knows My Name was also on the list of the top 100 books of 2008 on Amazon.com, but his sweetest victory to date is probably the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book.

Maranda Moses: In Canada and the UK, your book’s title is The Book of Negroes; however, it is known as Someone Knows My Name in the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Firstly, why did you choose The Book of Negroes as the first title? Secondly, what led to the book undergoing a name change?

15

Lawrence Hill: I chose the original title to reflect the historic document known as The Book of Negroes, which recorded details about the flight of blacks from Manhattan to Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolutionary War. It’s a real treasure trove of information about British, American, and Canadian history involving the migration of Blacks.

It’s such a fascinating document that I wanted to resurrect it and bring it to public attention in the world. However, after selling the book to W.W. Norton & Co, at the last minute just before going to print, they decided to change their minds about going with the original title, requiring me to change it for the American market. So I really had 48 hours to come up with a new title for the US edition.

I spent a weekend on the Baltic Sea in the former East Germany wondering what I was going to call this thing. I finally came up with Someone Knows My Name, which I like very much. It’s a hats off to James Baldwin who, of course, wrote Nobody Knows My Name. It also gets at the issues of identity, the loss of identity, and the loss of African identity that so accompanies the movement into slavery from Africa.

Americans felt that it would be just too incendiary to have the word “Negroes” appearing in the American edition of the novel. That decision was imposed on me, but later on I came to feel that it was the right decision. So many African Americans

16

mosaicmagazine.org

have come up to me on book tours and told me that they’re very glad the book changed titles. They wouldn’t have bought it or even looked at it if it had been called The Book of Negroes. I resisted at first, I resented it at first, and I’m now at peace with it.

MM: You really created a stunning fictional memoir of Aminata. How did you begin the process of weaving together such an epic life?

LH: Well, I guess it was a combination of imagination and research. Research, of course, will only get you so far, and if you try to be too wedded to history or to the facts then you’ll have a wooden, clunky, didactic novel. So the imagination and the heart have to kick in awfully fast for a novelist. I guess it was just a question of finding the right balance between really captivating historical detail, the story of a woman’s life, and the drama that people could relate to, regardless of historical accuracy.

I tried to imagine Aminata, the protagonist, to be my daughter. I gave her my eldest daughter’s name.

I did that to try to feel the character more deeply as I wrote the story.

MM: How many months of research went into this book?

LH: I worked on the research throughout the entire writing of the novel. The whole novel took

17

about five years from start to end. I never really stopped reading and gathering details. The more I wrote, the more detailed the research became. At the beginning it might have been to spend a few weeks boning up on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its generality to be sure that I understood the overall picture pretty well. I re-familiarized myself with that history. But as I went on, of course the research bore down into more detailed examinations, like what homemade inoculations were blacks from South Carolina using to protect themselves from small pox? Or what kind of herbal remedies might a woman in the American colonies use to catch babies during the 18th century?

The research got more and more specific as I kept writing, so I was truly researching until the very last minute.

MM: Why did you choose to write the novel from the point of view of this elderly woman?

LH: Well, she sort of chose me. I really never thought about narrating it from anyone else’s viewpoint. From the moment I learned about 1,200 Blacks who fled Nova Scotia in 1792, and sailed across the ocean to create the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone, I started to ask myself what would a woman look like on one of these ships? What might she walk like? How would her voice sound?

Did she have children? Did she have a lover? What

18

mosaicmagazine.org

happened to her parents? Can I color in this life and find a character to represent and embody this story of migration back and forth across the ocean?

I never really thought about anybody other than a woman. It was a woman’s story that came to me when I first imagined this migration. It was that woman’s story that I chose to write and that chose me to write it.

MM: Aminata is abducted from West Africa, and then brought to the American south and north and then to Nova Scotia, then back to Africa again. Finally, she agrees to lend her support to the Abolitionists. Sadly, she never quite establishes a home for herself in her later years, does she?

LH: No she doesn’t. She never really does find home. Her entire novel is a search for home. From the time that she’s abducted as an eleven-year old, she wants to go home. And it seems to be one of the driving emotional impulses in her life. It’s what keeps her going. It’s what fuels her desire to keep living. It’s hope (as hopeless as hope seems) that keeps her going. But of course in fiction you can never really give your characters exactly what they’re looking for. Life never works out the way the reader hopes it will or it’s not a very good novel.

It just didn’t seem right to give her everything she wanted. She came close and ultimately she has to

find home within, as we all do.

It’s an interesting meditation on home, homelessness, and the loss of home. I guess in some ways it’s an observation that when you are ripped from your home, you can never really go back entirely to the way things were. I’m not saying you can never go back physically, but you can never really go back to the person you were and to the way you used to live, when you’ve been stolen from your home and taken away for most of your life. Everything changes.

MM: That was actually one the thoughts I had later on in the book when she’s in Nova Scotia and is reaching a point where she’s not able to find her daughter. She says in the novel “The pain of my loss, it never really went away. The limbs had been severed and they would forever after be missing, but I kept going. Somehow I just kept going.” It’s so tragic that this woman has to continue moving forward because there really is no other option, is there?

LH: Yes, her life is one constant migration. That presents its own dramatic challenges, when you can’t really have a person settling anywhere for most of her life. But you’re right—she doesn’t have many options. She wants to keep going.

I’m astounded at her resilience and her courage.

How is it that she doesn’t give up? How is it that she doesn’t become a hateful, embittered, angry, murderess, suicidal person? It’s just astounding.

Ordinary people like this are born and survive every day—people going through the war in the former Yugoslavia or the Rwandan genocide. Just pick any horrific insult to humanity and just think of the survivor. Some people not only survive, but emerge with their souls in tact and still want to be loving, rich individuals. That to me is the miracle of human strength.

MM: One of the very important aspects about the slave trade you touch on in this novel is the fact that Aminata is abducted by black Africans, her own people in her community.

LH: My perception is that if I talk to Canadians, Americans, or Europeans for that matter, very few people seem to be able to imagine or see behind the opaque mask of slavery. I think that’s one of the challenges in history. Slaves don’t have lovers, or children, they don’t have individual struggles, they don’t have work. They have nothing except manacles on their wrist. That of course is terribly limiting. I wanted to get beyond that and to help readers step into a world where they could see a person intimately.

Slavery is not the sole defining factor of Aminata’s life by any means. To establish her humanity, I felt

19

it was necessary to begin her story in Africa. In this case, in the country that later becomes known as Mali where she’s born and raised, and eventually from which she’s abducted. The story begins with her village life as a free girl with parents who love her. It was working relatively well for her before the big moment. It becomes necessary not only to show her early years, but also then to show how she became captured.

The sad truth of the matter is that in the middle of the 1700s, which is when she’s abducted, Europeans were not traveling deep into the heart of West Africa. They weren’t conducting the slave trade from within the continent. They were sitting on the coast using weapons and goods to bribe, pay, or induce African intermediaries to bring captives to them. That’s how it worked. It’s not for me to dress it up, it’s just truth. I guess I was looking to tell a real story and not flinch from uncomfortable or disturbing facts.

What I was hoping to dramatize was that so many different people of different backgrounds were poisoned and had their lives affected by the slave trade. Obviously, we can think of first and foremost the captives who were taken into the Americas as slaves, but there were many other practitioners.

There were Europeans, there were Africans, there were people in North America, there were so-called Christians and self-professed Jews, there were so-

20

mosaicmagazine.org

called Muslims and all sorts of people who were involved in one way or another in the slave trade and affected by it. I deliberately chose to have people of various backgrounds drawn into the practice of the slave trade. It was one of the most international forms of commerce that existed in that time.

MM: You actually had the opportunity to travel to the UK to meet the Queen of England, as well as see the real The Book of Negroes. What was that experience like for you?

LH: That was fabulous! I’ve been fortunate enough to win some prizes for this book and one of them was the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Traditionally, the winner of that prize goes to meet the Queen as part of the package. I got the prize in South Africa in May 2008, and then in July I was brought to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace. It was just a short twenty-minute meeting in her apartment.

The next day, since I was in London, I gave some readings, met the press, and did some interviews, but I also had to go to the National Archives. I chose to go because I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to go to Kew, which is a suburb of London and where the National Archives is located. By far, the most exciting aspect of that trip was the opportunity to go see the original Book of Negroes. It’s a huge document.

Continued on page 46

10"

STROKE TARGETS BY COLOR. Know where you stand. The odds are African Americans are twice as likely to suffer a stroke as white Americans.

Photographed by Sean Kennedy Santos

Beating the odds isn’t about winning, it’s about living.

You have the power to end stroke. 1-888-4-STROKE / StrokeAssociation.org

21

Excerpt

Someone Knows My Name

by Lawrence Hill W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

And now I am old {LONDON, 1802} I SEEM TO HAVE TROUBLE DYING. By all rights, I should not have lived this long. But I still can smell trouble riding on any wind, just as surely as I could tell you whether it is a stew of chicken necks or pigs’ feet bubbling in the iron pot on the fire. And my ears still work just as good as a hound dog’s. People assume that just because you don’t stand as straight as a sapling, you’re deaf. Or that your mind is like pumpkin mush. The other day, when I was being led into a meeting with a bishop, one of the society ladies told another, “We must get this woman into Parliament soon. Who knows how much longer she’ll be with us?” Half bent though I was, I dug my fingers into her ribs. She let out a shriek and spun around to face me. “Careful,” I told her, “I may outlast you!”

There must be a reason why I have lived in all these lands, survived all those water crossings, while others fell from bullets or shut their eyes and simply willed their lives to end. In the earliest days, when I was free and knew nothing other, I used to sneak outside our walled compound, climb straight up the

22

mosaicmagazine.org

acacia tree while balancing Father’s Qur’an on my head, sit way out on a branch and wonder how I might one day unlock all the mysteries contained in the book. Feet swinging beneath me, I would put down the book—the only one I had ever seen in Bayo—and look out at the patchwork of mud walls and thatched coverings. People were always on the move. Women carrying water from the river, men working iron in the fires, boys returning triumphant from the forest with snared porcupines. It’s a lot of work, extracting meat from a porcupine, but if they had no other pressing chores, they would do it anyway, removing the quills, skinning the animal, slicing out the innards, practising with their sharp knives on the pathetic little carcass. In those days, I felt free and happy, and the very idea of safety never intruded on my thoughts.

I have escaped violent endings even as they have surrounded me. But I never had the privilege of holding onto my children, living with them, raising them the way my own parents raised me for ten or eleven years, until all of our lives were torn asunder. I never managed to keep my own children long, which explains why they are not here with me now, making my meals, adding straw to my bedding, bringing me a cape to hold off the cold, sitting with me by the fire with the knowledge that they emerged from my loins and that our shared moments had grown like corn stalks in damp soil.

Others take care of me now. And that’s a fine thing.

But it’s not the same as having one’s own flesh and blood to cradle one toward the grave. I long to hold my own children, and their children if they exist, and I miss them the way I’d miss limbs from my own body.

They have me exceedingly busy here in London.

They say I am to meet King George. About me, I have a clutch of abolitionists—big-whiskered, widebellied, bald-headed men boycotting sugar but smelling of tobacco and burning candle after candle as they plot deep into the night. The abolitionists say they have brought me to England to help them change the course of history. Well. We shall see about that. But if I have lived this long, it must be for a reason.

Fa means father in my language. Ba means river.

It also means mother. In my early childhood, my ba was like a river, flowing on and on and on with me through the days, and keeping me safe at night.

Most of my lifetime has come and gone, but I still think of them as my parents, older and wiser than I, and still hear their voices, sometimes deep-chested, at other moments floating like musical notes. I imagine their hands steering me from trouble, guiding me around cooking fires and leading me to the mat in the cool shade of our home. I can still picture my father with a sharp stick over hard earth, scratching out Arabic in flowing lines and speaking of the distant Timbuktu.

In private moments, when the abolitionists are not swirling about like tornadoes, seeking my presence in this deputation or my signature atop that petition, I wish my parents were still here to care for me. Isn’t that strange? Here I am, a broken-down old black woman who has crossed more water than I care to remember, and walked more leagues than a work horse, and the only things I dream of are the things I can’t have—children and grandchildren to love, and parents to care for me.

The other day, they took me into a London school and they had me talk to the children. One girl asked if it was true that I was the famous Meena Dee, the one mentioned in all the newspapers. Her parents, she said, did not believe that I could have lived in so many places. I acknowledged that I was Meena Dee, but that she could call me Aminata Diallo if she wanted, which was my childhood name. We worked on my first name for a while. After three tries, she got it. Aminata. Four syllables. It’s really not that hard. Ah–ME–naw–tah, I told her. She said she wished I could meet her parents. And her grandparents. I replied that it amazed me that she still had grandparents in her life. Love them good, I told her, and love them big. Love them every day.

She asked why I was so black. I asked why she was so white. She said she was born that way. Same here, I replied. I can see that you must have been quite pretty, even though you are so very dark, she said. You would be prettier if London ever got any

23

sun, I replied. She asked what I ate. My grandfather says he bets you eat raw elephant. I told her I’d never actually taken a bite out of an elephant, but there had been times in my life when I was hungry enough to try. I chased three or four hundred of them, in my life, but never managed to get one to stop rampaging through villages and stand still long enough for me to take a good bite. She laughed and said she wanted to know what I really ate. I eat what you eat, I told her. Do you suppose I’m going to find an elephant walking about the streets of London?

Sausages, eggs, mutton stew, bread, crocodiles, all those regular things. Crocodiles? she said. I told her I was just checking to see if she was listening. She said she was an excellent listener and wanted me to please tell her a ghost story.

Honey, I said, my life is a ghost story. Then tell it to me, she said.

As I told her, I am Aminata Diallo, daughter of Mamadu Diallo and Sira Kulibali, born in the village of Bayo, three moons by foot from the Grain Coast in West Africa. I am a Bamana. And a Fula. I am both, and will explain that later. I suspect that I was born in 1745, or close to it. And I am writing this account. All of it. Should I perish before the task is done, I have instructed John Clarkson—one of the quieter abolitionists, but the only one I trust—to change nothing. The abolitionists here in London have already arranged for me to write a short paper,

24

mosaicmagazine.org

about ten pages, of why the trade in human beings is an abomination and must be stopped. I have done so, and the paper is available in the society offices.

I have a rich, dark skin. Some people have described it as blue black. My eyes are hard to read, and I like them so. Distrust, disdain, dislike—one doesn’t want to give public notice of such sentiments. Some say that I was once uncommonly beautiful, but I wouldn’t wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.

Not much beauty remains now. Not the round, rising buttocks so uncommon in this land of English flatbacks. Not the thighs, thick and well packed, or the calves, rounded and firm like ripe apples. My breasts have fallen, where once they soared like proud birds. I have all but one of my teeth, and clean them every day. To me, a clean, white, full, glowing set of teeth is a beautiful thing indeed, and using the twig, vigorously, three or four times a day keeps them that way. I don’t know why it is, but the more fervent the abolitionist, it seems, the more foul the breath. Some men from my homeland eat the bitter kola nut so often that their teeth turn orange. But in England, the abolitionists do much worse, with coffee, tea and tobacco.

Continued on page 45

b MOSAIC

EDUCATOR LESSON PLANS

>>>

Mosaic’s lesson plans give secondary-school educators a connective tool to explore educational subjects such as history and social studies while also serving to increase the importance of books and reading.

Check it out! >>> Designed by Eisa Nefertari Ulen

25 read more.

Theme One Urban Studies

Narratives: Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones Thomas Glave’s “Baychester: A Memory” and “These Blocks, Not Square” Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street Topics for Discussion: 1) Outsider / Insider: Immigrants and Others in Urban America - How do the authors describe life for Mexican Americans, Bajan Americans, and Gay Americans?

2) Identity and Home – How do home and community shape the identities of characters? How does the nun’s perspective of Esperanza’s home influence her perception of Esperanza? Who, exactly, are “these people” in Glave’s essay? Why does Selina throw her bangle at the row of brownstones at the end of Marshall’s novel?

3) Seen and Unseen – What does each author reveal? What does each author veil?

4) “Beautiful Ugly” – Is Esperanza’s crumbling house beautiful? Is Selina’s Victorian brownstone ugly? Is Glave’s Baychester community beautiful or ugly? What does each author make the reader see? What does “beautiful ugly” mean?

5) Setting – Do characters ever leave their urban neighborhoods in these narratives? Who leaves, why, and where do they go? Are the settings small, constricted spaces or large, open areas? Are the characters confined or free in these communities?

Essay Idea: Write a personal essay that describes where you live. Start with the corner of your neighborhood block, and write in detail about what you see, smell, and hear as you walk home. Are there any people you can always count on to be outside in your neighborhood? How old are they and what do they do while they are outside? What does your front door look like? How many doors must you pass through to get to your home? How many keys do you use to get inside your home? How many sets of steps must you walk, starting with any steps outside your building or house, to get to your home? Do you have an elevator outside your home? Do you have an elevator inside your home? Provide as many details as possible so the reader of your personal essay can “see” where you live by reading what you write.

Additional Activities: 1) Use maps of The Bronx and Brooklyn and discuss the 20th century migration patterns of West Indian immigrants to New York City. Read about Robert Moses and discuss his Continued on page 48

26

mosaicmagazine.org

Theme Two: Documenting Hate Narratives: Paule Marshall’s Triangular Road Thomas Glaves’s “Baychester: A Memory,” “(Re-) Recalling Essex Hemphill,” and “Re-membering Steen Fenrich” Lawrence Hill’s Someone Knows My Name Sandra Cisneros’ “Geraldo No Last Name” Additional Narrative: Ida B Wells Barnett’s The Red Record and Southern Horrors Topics for Discussion: 1) Describe your reaction to the documentation at work in each of these narratives. What did you feel as each writer documented various hate crimes, including lynching, slavery, and the slave trade.

2) Think about Glave’s title, “Re-membering Steen Fenrich.” What does “dismemberment” mean? Does his essay “Re-member” Steen Fenrich?

3) How are the portraits of murdered African Americans similar to Glave’s portraits of murdered gay men? How are the portraits different? Are the differences significant?

4) Is the lynching of African Americans worse than the hate crimes against gay men in these works? Should we even compare the pain and loss of people who are attacked and killed because they are different? Does it matter that one per Continued on page 48

27

Theme Three Coming of Age

Narratives: Lawrence Hill’s Someone Knows My Name Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones Sandra Cisneros’, The House on Mango Street Topics for Discussion: 1) Implicit and Explicit Meanings – Look at Cisneros’ “Alicia Who Sees Mice.” Why do you think Alicia is afraid of her father? Read the last line of Cisneros’ “There Was an Old Woman…” What does the last sentence of this vignette imply? How do these vignettes about Mango Street neighbors help the reader understand the struggles Esperanza experiences as she grows up there?

2) In what ways is Aminata’s shift from girlhood to adulthood impacted by her slave identity?

What were her parents doing to help her become a woman before she was stolen from her homeland? Does anyone help her finish that process of becoming a woman once she is sold into slavery?

3) What does Selina do in Marshall’s novel that would shock her mother the most? Why does Selina rebel against her mother’s teachings and demands? How does she rebel, and does Selina’s rebellion help or hurt her coming-of-age?

4) In all three narratives, girls are becoming women. How do men and boys impact these young characters as they grow up?

5) Which of the female protagonists is strongest? Which is weakest? What makes each character weak or strong? How do you define strength and weakness on Mango Street, in Bedford Stuyvesant, in the village of Bayo, and on a slave plantation?

Essay Idea: Write a vignette, poem, or short story about a young person coming-of-age. If you are a young woman, write a boy growing up. If you are a young man, write about a girl. Be preContinued on page 48

28

mosaicmagazine.org

reading list 1. Calvin Baker’s Once Two Heroes (lynchings, WWII, race relations) 2. Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (water and The Middle Passage in African American literature, 20th century America, migrations, the slave trade) 3. Langston Hughes’ “I’ve Known Rivers” (water and The Middle Passage in African American literature) 4. Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (slavery and The Middle Passage) 5. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (the slave narrative) 6. Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (the slave narrative) 7. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (the slave narrative) 8. Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (coming-of-age) Continued on page 48

The Literary Freedom Project is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt not-for-profit arts organization, established in 2004, that supports the literary arts through education, creative thinking, and new media. Towards this goal, The Literary Freedom Project publishes Mosaic Literary Magazine; develops literature-based lesson plans and workshops; and hosts the Mosaic Literary Conference & Festival, an annual literature-education conference.

tccvyvrrRRufn

29

a

30

mosaicmagazine.org

reviews

Gods and Soldiers The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing Edited by Rob Spillman Penguin Books Reviewed by A. Naomi Jackson Penguin’s new anthology of contemporary African writing, Gods and Soldiers, was compiled by editor Rob Spillman. Spillman, founder of Tin House, came to African writing while working on a special issue of the literary journal several years ago. The book takes on an incredibly difficult task—to span the whole expanse of a continent divided by language, culture, and politics, not to mention war.

In attempting to gather the best of contemporary African writing, Spillman includes classics by master writers like Chinua Achebe and Nuruddin Farrah, and introduces readers to relative newcomers like Djibouti’s Abdourahman A. Waberi. This task, while enviable, has resulted in a book that feels both accomplished in its breadth and unsatisfying because of the lack of a thorough clear line. In short, in trying to represent the best of African writing over the last 75 years or so, Spillman has created an anthology that is at times engaging, and at others disjointed.

At its best, Gods and Soldiers gives the casual student of African literature a primer on some of the major issues that authors from the continent have

been facing post-colonialism. The anthology is divided geographically, linguistically, and by genre, with writers represented from Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone north, east, west, and southern Africa. There is real value in being able to read a group of writers in English from countries such as Morocco, Mozambique, and Cameroon. And it is interesting to follow the question of the advantages and disadvantages of language that Laila Lalami and Chinua Achebe take up in altogether different, yet elegant ways. Achebe, arguing on the dawn of independence of many African nations in the late 1950s, argues for the utility of writing in English as a way to reach the broadest possible audience, both in Africa and beyond. Lalami writes a short literary biography expressing concern for both the pressure to write and read outside one’s native tongue, and the lack of French and Arabic translations of works from African writers. Beyond the question of language, simmering beneath the surface of the anthology are questions of racial identity and Africanness as explored by J.M. Coetzee in an essay on the memoirs of Breyten Breytenbach.

There are great moments in the anthology when the reader glimpses the innovation and wit of the newest generation of African writers. Doreen Baingana’s “Christianity Killed the Cat,” causes spontaneous laughter. “The Manhood Test,” taken from Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s collection of short stories, The Prophet of Zongo Street, is one of the anthology’s

31

standout selections. An excerpt from Ngugi Wa’ Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow deftly throws light on the figure of the despot who has become all too common in African politics. Here, on the “ruler’s birthday,” the citizens, including a good number of them wasted away with kwashiorkor, assemble at the national stadium with the promise of eating his birthday cake.

With the inclusion of writers from North Africa, Spillman overcomes the desert divide between subSaharan Africa and Northern Africa, which has a complicated relationship to its African identity and Islamic and Arabic cultures and history. An excerpt from Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Sadaawi will be a welcome treat for readers unfamiliar with her work. And many who have been frustrated by the artificial divisions between North Africans and the rest of the continent will be happy to see this development. In any anthology, the pressures to include inevitably result in excluding someone. Sorely missed here are writings by South African giants Zoe Wicomb and Bessie Head, as well as the late South African writer K. Sello Duiker.

Gods and Soldiers invites the reader to learn more about African writers and writing. Found therein are new literary stars Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Binyavanga Wainana, as well as heavyweights like South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer.

With this anthology, the list of must-read books by

32

mosaicmagazine.org

African writers grows long enough that even the most voracious reader couldn’t get through it in the longest summer.

Midnight A Gangster Love Story

by Sister Souljah Atria Books Reviewed by Sidik Fofana It was arguably the late ’90s when hip-hop started to stretch into grey areas of definition. At some point, the genre bubbled out of its breeches, no longer fitting into the symmetric four elements of emceeing, DJ’ing, graffiti writing, and B-boying. Among the medley of subgenres palpitating with hip-hop influence, urban literature made a sneaky entrance into popular culture. This genre, spawned from the universality of hip-hop clout, in a way has compensated for many of rap’s shortcomings; it elaborates on underdeveloped issues raised in the prototypical rap song. A hip-hop song, due to its metrical limitations, merely mentions things like crack dealers, gangstas, and prostitutes. A street lit work spins them into a full-fledge narrative.

Sister Souljah’s first novel, The Coldest Winter, is an example of the street-lit void filler. As a Public Enemy affiliate, her rap career was relatively lost

in the shuffle. Her political bark was too aggressive for hip-hop wax, and it resulted in poor record sales and relentless censorship. Her debut novel, at the time, although it may have been considered a weaker branch of the hip-hop network, was actually a more form-fitting medium to address urban societal ills. That’s why Souljah’s narrative about Winter Santiaga, a gold-digging teen from Brooklyn who navigates both her crime-ridden borough, solidified urban lit as a viable genre. In short, the hip-hop verse makes a social issue the subject; the hip-hop book makes it the plot.

The Coldest Winter Ever was stereotypical in its character portrayal, yet Souljah’s new novel Midnight is more global. The development is just as much due to the culturization of hip-hop itself as it is to Souljah’s literary vision. The focus switches from a Brooklyn girl’s fixation with a young drug dealer in The Coldest Winter Ever to that drug dealer’s journey from Sudan to America, and the story of his relationship with a Japanese girl, Akemi. In the former, Midnight is likable because of his dark skin, material possessions, and status in the drug game. In the latter, Midnight draws intrigue from his East African roots, martial arts prowess, and Islamic grounding. Of his own upbringing, Midnight comments, “We spoke Arabic at home, but he made sure I could speak at least the greetings of several African tongues; and I also studied English in school and practiced speaking it along with my schoolmates.”

Though the first few chapters of Midnight present the classic immigrant story of arriving in America and seeking upward mobility, the novel is chiefly a love story between Midnight and Akemi, the subject of his constant affection. Both plots offer more depth than the often violent and exaggerated plots of standard works of urban literature, yet Souljah—in her attempts to produce a more complex oeuvre—over stylizes her characters at times. Midnight’s mother, Umma, is the all-but-stereotypical orthodox Muslim woman—humble, subservient, and heavily veiled in Islamic garb that only heightens imagination about her concealed beauty. Akemi is predictably quiet and coquettish with the chastity of a Japanese maiden.

Yet, Midnight, as dreamy as he seems, poses some unresolved contradictions. While Souljah makes it clear that Midnight will take drastic measures to protect his mother and little sister, Naja, some of his behavior still seems extreme and almost unrealistic. Early in the novel, he murders Gold Star Tafari, a sketchy patron of Umma’s Sudanese fabric business, defying the aura of peace and discipline that previously surrounded him in the novel. Also, readers are not given much depth to the relationship between Midnight and Umma. The two never fight or argue even when Umma finds out that the love of his life is not a Muslim girl. As a matter of fact, when Akemi meets Umma for the first time at a wedding, she “held on to Umma as if they had

33

known each other for years.”

Midnight is still a landmark novel. It shows that urban literature authors don’t remain in the same formulaic capsule of excessive sex and violence.

Souljah’s second novel represents an earnest effort to produce more meaningful art. It is evidence that street lit, like many art forms (including the novel), is a still-evolving entity. Midnight would be very differently received if it were a work of stagnancy and not ascendancy.

Home: Social Essays

By LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Akashic Books Reviewed by Robert Fleming Back in the day, LeRoi Jones was the spiritual and cultural beacon in the late 1960s and 1970s, using his word wizardry, acerbic wit, encyclopedic knowledge, and incendiary social and political vision to provide the necessary guidance for those who wanted to break away from the passive, compromised mindset of the Negro battered by Jim Crow and legalized segregation.

Brooklyn’s Akashic Books, as a part of its Akashic Classics: Renegade Reprint Series, has released Home: Social Essays, a book of Jones (Amiri Baraka)

34

mosaicmagazine.org

from 1965, at the height of the bloody Civil Rights Movement. Even after 40 years, its 24 essays still carry a potent punch to many people interested in the political and social mood of one of the pivotal times in our history. The commentaries yield a snapshot of that era’s critical events: the Cuban Revolution, the Birmingham bombings, the Harlem riots, the slaying of Malcolm X, the politicization of the black male, the struggles of the Revolutionary theatre, the delights of soul food, the trials and triumphs of black writing, and the cold-blooded fight game.

In his revamped introduction, Jones revisits the years past and put them into perspective, not politically but personally. He astutely writes in this revised look upon his return to a turbulent America from a fledgling Cuban nation: “It was on my return to Newark in 1966, that what I knew superficially was thrust forcefully upon me to fully understand: that there were classes and class struggle among black people, just like all peoples. Coming home and seeing these struggles around real social and political issues transformed me from cultural nationalist to communist. I had touched some of these bases before, but this was the beginning of struggle on a higher, and perhaps even more fundamental, level.”

His lengthy essay, “Cuba Libre,” is a marvel of detailed observation and analysis, as he travels

with other black thinkers to witness the emerging socialist land. Jones has never done anything by halves, as the Brits say. He becomes enamored with the concept of revolution, imagining how it could translate here. Witness his intriguing interaction with El Commandante Fidel Castro, the architect of the Cuban Revolution. Another essay, the 1961 letter to columnist-artist Jules Feiffer, is a hearty “bitch-slap” to timid white liberals everywhere and their political cowardice.

His pen and mind sparkles throughout the book.

Note the majestic essay, “City of Harlem,” a social and cultural history of the capital of black America, done as well as anything written by James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison. You can almost smell and taste as Jones describes the treats of “Soul Food” in the eateries above 100th Street in New York City: barbecued ribs, fried chicken, grits, okra, blackeyes peas and rice, gumbo—all served at the wellknown places of guilty pleasure—the Red Rooster, Wells, Joch’s, or Jennylin’s. In the essay, “The Myth of a Negro Literature,” Jones is on target when he singles out the mastery and authenticity of black music of blues and jazz after slamming the phony Europeanized books that some of the more popular Negro writers were producing at the time.

the words— “is” in the scathing essay on a writer’s values, “Brief Reflections on Two Hot Shots.” And oh man, he dogs the writers, James Baldwin and Peter Abraham and their production of “noise.” His take, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?,” is a rallying cry to mobilize the weak and powerless against the brute forces of the white racists.

There is a reason why this book is considered a classic in the Baraka literary canon, with some of the daring, powerful essays: “Tokenism: 300 Years for Five Cents,” “The Last Days of the American Empire,” “American Sexual Reference: Black Male,” and “The Legacy of Malcolm X and the Coming of the Black Nation.” Sometimes he gets it wrong, but on average, he makes stunning predictions in these commentaries. When he falters, it is because the wisdom of time has proven him on the wrong side.

We love when Jones is smart, angry, perceptive, and creative. This book, Home: Social Essays, is as fascinating and intriguing as it was upon its first reading in the late ’60s. And the observations of Jones (Baraka) still remain timely even as we speak.

Like a superb trial lawyer, Jones dissects the meaning of the words, individual and individuality—like the embattled former President Bill Clinton wrestled with

35

More Than Just Race Being Black And Poor In The Inner City

By William Julius Wilson WW Norton Reviewed by Robert Fleming William Julius Wilson, the leading sociologist of race and class in recent memory, is a very smart man.

In fact, Wilson has received a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” awarded a National Medal of Science, and has been deemed one of Time Magazine’s 25 “Most Influential People in America.” It’s hard to be convinced when Wilson speaks on race and class as he does so aptly in his new book, More Than Just Race.

With the long-awaited election of President Barack Obama, a black man, whites in America feel that the issue of race and bigotry is not the hot button issue that it once was. Wilson, author of The Declining Significance of Race, says not so fast, reminding us that poverty, violence, and hopelessness in our inner cities are still dire plagues that threaten the promise of homeland security. The hood, with its many dangerous projects and drug crimes, seems to be stuck in a time warp, as if the progress of the nation has passed it by.

The debate over poverty in the inner city has been split down political party lines. Conservatives in the GOP think racism is not the underlying problem,

36

mosaicmagazine.org

instead they consider the morality and character of the poor to be the preventive restricting progress.

They list loose morals, violence, family instability, and poor planning rather than the barrier of racism from denying them the American Dream. Liberals from the Democratic party think it’s the emotional and psychological residue from slavery and Jim Crow that cripples the poor.

The Harvard sociologist Wilson uses all of his previous research from two decades in his new book to state systemic and institutional barriers and cultural liabilities that hinder the poor from shedding the ghetto and poverty. Combining all of these elements to frame a new context to hold the disadvantaged in place, he addresses the three crucial areas that spell disaster for those living in poverty: the enduring status of the inner-city ghetto, the tragedy of the unprepared, unschooled black male, and the decline of the black family.

Wilson probes the structural barriers put in place by the Federal government before 1960, illegal lending practice and racial redlining, flight of urban jobs due to automation and overseas labor, and higher employment standards for better paying jobs. After the black middle class fled the inner city, the poor and the unskilled were left to their own devices, isolated, less healthy, and totally out of the employment loop.

Black men, young and old, are left behind in the rigid confines of the ghetto, with no school degrees and few employment prospects. Desperate, they can barely provide for themselves, or the numerous children born out of wedlock, so they abandon the women and their families, Wilson argues. The statistics he offers are compelling and lend weight to his social theories. Their women assume the risky role of single motherhood, and the youngsters are reared in broken homes where the cycle of crime and despair are repeated over and over. Wilson defends the infamous Daniel Patrick Moynihan report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” (1965), saying it was fine as far as it went, but its general condemnation cancelled any possibility for a national dialogue of ghetto poverty.

nature of race and poverty in the inner city, and therefore broadly based cultural explanations that focus on personal character are more likely to gain acceptance.”

Much of this book makes Wilson sound like a liberal, but what white critics miss is how he is saying that there must be a truthful, unbiased conversation on poverty and race. He lauds President Obama for trying to start that process, yet he knows that the right wing conservatives will not permit that dialogue.

Gospel

by Samiya Bashir Redbone Press Reviewed by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“If, in America, you can grow up to be anything you want to be, then any destiny—even poverty—can be rightly viewed through the lens of personal achievement or failure,” Wilson writes. “Certainly it’s true that most Americans have little direct knowledge or understanding of the complex

When Wilson stresses that the cure to the thorny problem of the poor can be found in eliminating the persistent power of racism and improving the American economy, he realizes that his theories will be resisted by liberal and conservative alike.

The acclaimed author knows that the poor have very few. Overall, this is probably one of the finest books on race and poverty Wilson has written, and it surely deserves our attention.

In the beginning there was the word. And before that there was the darkness. Gospel, Samiya Bashir’s new collection of poems, published by independent black gay and lesbian publisher Redbone Press, is an extended meditation on the relationship between that darkness and the word.

Set in the mouths of crows, on the edges of couches and dirty tables, and in the hands of the

37

dispossessed, Bashir’s poems awaken a desire to caress the mundane, hoping your fingers will find divine crumbs of revelation. Bashir’s project, inhabiting the tradition of black gospel music’s straddling contradiction, standing in the sacred and the profane, is timely. In a moment when the question of the relationship between faith and sexuality has been put in the media limelight through the discourse of marriage amendments, this project takes a step back, redefining both sexuality and salvation with a close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure, and transcendence.

Starting at the crossroads, flying through the living room, the sick bed, the bedroom and the sanctuary and ending in the locker room, Hugin and Munin, two crows drawn from Norse mythology, but steeped in black vernacular, frame the collection and provide the reader access to the intimacy of the poetic subjects. And with this crow’s eye view, blackened and shadowed by death, Bashir asks us to question our own bodies, because the question of how and whether [we??] can find a way to love our bodies and each other is the question of our salvation.

“Jesus gon’ hear my song sho’ nuff” the most explicitly “gospel” poem of the collection explores the erotic value of worship, describing the body of a churchwoman in the ecstasy of divine song.

38

mosaicmagazine.org

It begins with a flutter at the pit of my stomach Rises to a warm sweet spot in my chest As I dress it begins to reach my throat Leak out in bits of cry--Placed after three beautifully erotic lesbian love poems, this reminder of the embodiment of praise in the black church emphasizes the resonances between religious fervor and sexual expression, disputing a media narrative that presents the two as if they were mutually exclusive. If, as this poem suggests, the body is a sacred manifestation of spirit in its full expression of the vibration of song and the sensation of life, what do the legal, medical, and social limits we place on our bodies cost us?

“Topographic Shifts” which gracefully and painfully describes the amputation or “correction” of a baby girl born with twelve fingers and twelve toes, raises key questions as it forces us to imagine the pain of dismemberment without consent.

How is it doneRemolding body into Image of body?

Reminding us of Lucille Clifton’s extra digits, which haunt her writing hands like phantom antennae, this poem asks the reader to confront the ethical dilemma of the difference between how the body actually manifests, and the “image of body” what

we want it to be. The poem ends with an ironic cliché that uses shallow words of comfort to disturb the reader. After detailing the process of using ether and string and scissors to “…rip. Root. Cauterize.” the “offending” or “wasteful” extra limbs of the newborn, the narrator comments that This condition is more common than you’d think.

If the “condition” is “common” then what is the purpose of the violent imposition of conformity on the body of a baby? What does it mean for your body to be “wrong” from the moment you enter the world? What does it mean when we redefine our own bodies, in their natural diversity, as “offending” and “wasteful?” Whose bodies are usually marked as offending and wasteful? Is this not a question of race and class? Whose genitals are modified by doctors hoping to cure ambiguity in the birthing room? Is this not a question of gender and sexuality?

Bashir moves from the deviant infant body to the sick adult body in “Breakadawn.” Written from the perspective of someone who lives at the brink of death in a body riddled by pain and lacking normal functions, this poem offers a meditation on what it means to wake up bedridden. Organized by a repeated invocation for the suffering person to

“remember” the condition, the poem will not let us forget the dismembering of the infant’s fingers and toes in the preceding poem, while at the same time taunting the poem’s subject with the impossibility of putting a body back together. Once again the body is not only a problem in its own being and its own feeling, but also in its social meaning. remember instead doctor after doctor calling you dirty just dirty shame What definition of healing causes us to criminalize each other’s bodies? What is gained by blaming a sick person for their own pain? What does it mean for someone who is sick in a culture that values health as if it is a choice to choose to wake up each day anyway?

In “Reckoning Song,” the most formally experimental poem in the collection, and the poem that happens to follow the two previously mentioned poems, Bashir extends this question of the body, moving away from the intimate second person that she used in the previous two poems and fully inhabiting the first person. The poem, broken by internal bullet points depicts the beauty and contradiction of the body at the point of breaking, mediated by will. The question to be reckoned with is the question of what the body can do, and whether what we can do with

39

our ecstatic, desiring, dancing bodies will save us or destroy us. Asking what if I can shake it * and not break it, the poem uses repetition and space between the words on the page to dance out the space between queer theory, race politics, and disability activism.

Like each of the poems in this collection, this should be read carefully, and more than once. What do our bodies mean, in their limits and their possibilities?

Bashir has continued the trajectory of this question in the performances and events that promote the work recruiting queer and trans fellow artists to collaborate with her on stage performing as crows and witnesses. The live incarnation of Gospel reminds us that the crow is not always a symbol of death. On the page and in person, Gospel works out the good news contouring embodied life in its complex and painful glory.

City Kid

by Nelson George Viking Books Reviewed by Sidik Fofana Often recognized for his seminal text Hip-Hop America, Nelson George rides the frontier of culturally astute writers. He and his contemporaries have successfully melded the global genre with the social avalanches that spurned it. Yet unlike his fellow writers, Jeff Chang, Mark Anthony Neal, William Jelani Cobb, Toure, and others, George’s foundation is not merely hip-hop. It’s black music as a whole. Long before hip-hop swelled into the world phenomenon it is today, George was penning

40

mosaicmagazine.org

pieces for Billboard Magazine and Amsterdam News, and his beat was the R&B, disco, and sometimes rock ‘n’ roll circuit. His career, much like this allencompassing memoir of his coming-of-age as a writer, lends itself to the invisible benefits of career evolution.

City Kid is an autobiography about how George’s schooling, neighborhood, internships, layoffs, etc. influenced his writing. It starts in Brownsville—after George’s prelude about how his parents met—where his mother is working hard as a teacher to support him and his sister, while entertaining a couple of unfruitful romances. George’s recollections of growing up in the notorious Tilden Projects poke at the edginess of urban survival. “When I was around seven or eight and just beginning to understand growing up in a tough neighborhood, bullies would try to intimidate me,” he writes. “They’d try to steal my Pensky Pinky rubberball, cheat me at games, and ask for money. Out of nowhere, my little sister would show up and challenge them. ‘Don’t mess with my brother,’ she’d demand.”

Amidst the chaos and calamity of a Brooklyn upbringing, George graduated high school, attended St. John’s University, and secured several writing gigs. It is at this student/professional ‘tweener stage when George’s personal narrative really starts.

We don’t get some one-in-a-million story about a steady ladder climb to success; George’s travels in the field of journalism are often desultory and heartbreaking. He writes about being laid off from Amsterdam News in his early twenties and being banned from Billboard because he used “black English” in concert reviews. George’s successes, which are evident from numerous anecdotes, come from being resilient and annoyingly persistent, and not from any prescribed road to self-actualization.

George obviously wants to show readers that it took him years of receiving rejection letters from Village Voice Editor Robert Christgau and writing for lessthan-ideal wages to reach the fame he has today.

George spares none when it comes to telling of the spoils of that fame. Throughout his memoir, he constantly acknowledges his weak spot for women and has no delusions about the reason behind the growing pool from which to choose.

“Through my access to events I met older, more sexually active women,” George recalls. “I didn’t get any handsomer or dress any better (style never being one of my strong suits), but I became a more exciting date.”

It is that point in the book where George weaves in his breakthroughs as an author and film producer with his marvelous social life as a young, single, hip writer. The latter part of the autobiography is more about the lifestyle of a writer than the writing itself, which by no means takes away from the validity of the work since his life experiences influence his work. For instance, stiff questioning about the sources from TV anchor Bryant Gumbel on his 1986 book on Motown, Where Did Our Love Go, teaches George a lesson about keeping his personal standards high. George takes much wisdom from each of his writing milestones, and that wisdom makes each subsequent project more successful.

These days, Nelson George is more of a film icon than a music journalism icon. Years of notable writing, editing, and living in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene section led him to produce films like Cell Block Four starring Chris Rock, and the inspirational HBO hit, Life Support, based on the life of his sister who tested HIV positive a few years back. He also has made life-long friends with Spike Lee, whose first

film, She’s Gotta Have It, he helped finance.

City Kid is a direct testament to the stages of life. This is a memoir of a writer who has ridden the wave of writing trends—from music journalist to hip-hop to black cinema—and has enjoyed the success of one who recognizes a good thing when he sees it.

The World in Half

by Cristina Henríquez Riverhead Books Reviewed by Jada Bradley After receiving much acclaim for her short story collection, Come Together, Fall Apart, Henríquez, whose stories have been published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, is back on the scene with a novel. The World In Half, like its main character is split between the U.S. and Panama.

Henríquez, who is half Panamanian, spent a few weeks a year there as a child.

Mira, the protagonist of The World In Half, has spent her life in the U.S. with her mother, Catherine, hearing little about her Panamanian father. Her mother named her after Miraflores—after one of the locks in the Panama Canal—and made sure she learned Spanish, but these fleeting links to her father and his homeland are not enough. Catherine suffers from Alzheimer’s, and while searching for medical bills in her ailing mother’s room, Mira discovers letters that reveal that it was Catherine who left her father behind and not the other way around. A usually studious and cautious college student, Mira makes the uncharacteristically sudden decision to journey to Panama, determined to meet the father she has never known.

41

Just as Mira’s decision to leave everything and travel to a place she’s never been to meet a father she has never met seems out of the ordinary, so does the author’s decision to begin her novel with the protagonist narrating a passage of scientific facts about the Earth’s core. But as the reader will soon discover, the story’s protagonist is a geophysical sciences major. The conceit works, although at times it can get a little precious: just as Mira notes that it would be “impossible for any human to get so close to such a fiery heart [the Earth’s core],” so it will be difficult for Mira to get to the heart of the matter in her own situation.

Catherine abandons Gatun (Mira’s father) while carrying his child, reversing the standard tale of the no-good father who leaves a woman with child. Instead, Catherine separates herself from a heartbroken man and the child he longs to know.

Mira is able to piece together what led her mother to that path, and though Mira is not immediately enraged, she does not find it easy to forgive being separated from her father.

In interviews, Henríquez has been candid about the changes that the manuscript went through prior to publication: originally, Mira only appeared in the last third of the story. Initially, the book centered on the Panama Canal, which explains why the author wanted to make use of all of the factual information she had about the canal’s construction and operation. In addition to passages that feel a little like nonfiction, the novel also dips its toe into another literary category: the epistolary novel. Mira writes to her friends while she is away. Danilo writes to Mira. When Mira discovers her parents’ letters, she (and by extension the reader) is able to view the breakdown of Gatun and Catherine’s relationship in their words.

As with any journey/travel adventure, one needs a guide. In this case, Mira’s guide is Danilo, who sells flowers and is a bit of a drifter. Danilo is the nephew of Hernán, a doorman who Mira befriends at her hotel. As fate would have it, Danilo knows something about losing parents—he was raised by Hernán after his parents left him behind. Danilo’s parents left with some notion of returning for him, but never did. Unlike Mira who cannot find her father, Danilo knows how to reach his parents and chooses not to, explaining, “The one who gets left behind deserves to be found.”

Henríquez uses Mira’s geology studies and the process of building the Panama Canal as metaphors for her characters’ lives and relationships, but the other theme here is one of being lost and found.

Since she suffers from Alzheimer’s, Catherine will lose the very memories she tried to avoid confronting, but as Mira concludes, “Memory doesn’t have seams to hem it in.” By the end, Mira learns that the father she thought had left was with her all along, and that the mother who raised her has always been and will continue to be beyond her reach in many ways.

What Mira finds is not what she expected. As she processes learning of Catherine’s betrayal while

42

grieving her illness, she also finds that Hernán and Danilo haven’t exactly been upfront with her either.

Without realizing it, people can retrace their parents’ steps, even when the circumstances are different.

Danilo reminds Mira that she has the opportunity to forge her own relationship with Panama, and she doesn’t have to repeat history.

mosaicmagazine.org

The Torturer’s Wife

by Thomas Glave City Lights Books Reviewed by Vincent F.A. Golphin When does the obscenity that surrounds us demand that the writer hold, as it were, a mirror up to nature, even in all its vileness?

Kenyon Review editor Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, wrote that question in September 2008, as the journal prepared to publish, “The Torturer’s Wife,” the title tale from this second short story collection

by Glave. At first, obscene comes off as too dramatic a word to use for stories readers are likely to enjoy.

Yet, those who surrender to the attractions of the nine stories in this 262-page book will likely find the term is apt. The way the author’s words flesh out near hyper-graphic portraits of the most desperate and human moments is beautifully obscene. More, at points the narrative is poetic.

Glave builds sentences and chooses and places words often as deftly as Wynton Marsalis blows a trumpet. The tightly woven prose explores human interactions in ways that can prompt readers who seek literary thrills to see a pleasant freshness in the plots. On the other hand, those who turn to books for entertainment are likely to push aside the work in confusion.

The Torturer’s Wife kicks open the doors of conventional yarn spinning, and challenges readers with the narrative’s pace, frankness, and clarity to push beyond their psychic and emotional comforts. Murder, butchery, burnings, hate crimes, kidnappings, torture, and infidelity are subjects most Americans wish were only fiction, but the way Glave walks through characters’ inner struggles

with them forces readers to acknowledge such atrocities as reality. For example, in “The Torturer’s Wife,” about a mother driven to kill her children, the gravity of the main character’s thoughts and circumstances forecast a deliberate trajectory that either bodes destruction or freedom. Whichever, is left to the reader: The voice that will rise in a future time from the sea and recount this entire night will remember how, now, she stops outside the boy’s room. Stops, and gazes with that expression that is no expression at the other woman, reappeared, who gazes back at her. Who now soundlessly opens the door to the boy’s room as she feels her own hand on the doorknob, as they both walk into the room...There are voices, so many: inside her, outside of her, and out there, in the garden. Voices begging her now please, not to do it. Begging her to leave him, leave him, please. The boy.

The precious sleeping boy.

On this planet, where corruption, violence, sexism, and homophobia predominate, those who seek entertainment will want to believe that men cannot be killed just because they ignore a society’s lines of race, class, and sexual preference. The stories evoke a feeling of immediacy, as the narratives remind readers of local events. For example, “Between,” although unspecified, could play out in any tightknit, U.S. community, as happened in the October 1998 murder of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. The narrative probes gay and straight males’ attitudes and actions, and endows the harshness depicted with deeper significance to force reconsiderations of what it means to be human: The first time I went into him, I didn’t even

43

know that I was thinking it until I heard it, the thought, come back out to me as I heard him groaning under me: So this is what one of them feels like, I thought.

This is how it is with them. Tight. And hot. And gripping. And this is how it feels to be inside of one of them, I thought.

This is how they smell, like him, and how they taste, I thought: like him.

“Out There,” the longest story, takes readers into Jamaica’s violent gay backlash to sharply consider the roots of the vicious acts against gays in the home of his ancestors. Glave experiments with the power of language in ways similar to MacArthur prizewinner Colson Whitehead, and plots like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Columbian, whose short stories and novels such as Love in the Time of Cholera, popularized magical realism, a literature that inserts the surreal into human reality, which is a seat of strength in The Torturer’s Wife.

The Other Side of Paradise

By Staceyann Chin Scribner (Simon & Schuster) Reviewed by Tara Betts If you’ve ever heard Staceyann Chin’s poetry onstage or the storytelling in her one-woman shows, you would have been introduced to a woman with indomitable spirit. In this memoir, readers aren’t introduced to Staceyann Chin as a poet, but they meet the people who forged Chin’s strong will and insistent voice in her childhood home, Jamaica.

The Other Side of Paradise begins in Lottery, Jamaica, where Chin is born on the living room floor to

44

mosaicmagazine.org

her mother, who does not want a child. Eventually, Chin and her brother Delano live with and are cared for by their grandmother. As Staceyann and Delano get older and go to school for the first time, their needs become more than the elderly, nearly deaf grandmother can provide. This small family leaves Lottery to get help from Uncle Harold and the strict hand of Aunt June. It is while Delano and Staceyann are at their aunt and uncle’s home that they see their grandmother become the family’s domestic and shushing the two new children, who are clearly not in favor like Aunt June’s own children.

Grandmother warns Staceyann to be quiet to avoid beatings from Aunt June, who eventually puts out Delano and Staceyann when their mother finally comes to visit with expensive, impractical gifts. The children are understandably excited, but the excitement is short-lived. Mummy, or Hazel to the rest of the family, implies that the children are too thin.

Aunt June drops off the children at Hazel’s hotel in Montego Bay. She can only bear her children for a few days between naps and going out every night.

Hazel abandons the two children on a cluttered filthy house on Blood Lane where Staceyann is deposited in the care of her grandmother’s youngest sister, Miss John. Her brother Delano ends up in the care of his father, a Chinese grocer.

Staceyann meets her father later, when she cannot pay for books and school uniforms. Miss John will not allow her to “beg” for anything from anyone.

With a few clues, Staceyann tracks down her father, Junior Chin at his furniture store. He denies that he is indeed her father, but other relatives recognize her mother’s features in her “slim and neat” build and offer to help. Her father softens enough to fund her education until she leaves for college. Even Continued on page 49

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill My hair has mostly fallen out now, and the remaining strands are grey, still curled, tight to my head, and I don’t fuss with them. The East India Company brings bright silk scarves to London, and I have willingly parted with a shilling here and there to buy them, always wearing one when I am brought out to adorn the abolitionist movement. Just above my right breast, the initials GO run together, in a tight, inch-wide circle. Alas, I am branded, and can do nothing to cleanse myself of the scar. I have carried this mark since the age of eleven, but only recently learned what the initials represent. At least they are hidden from public view. I am much happier about the lovely crescent moons sculpted into my cheeks.

I have one fine, thin moon curving down each of my cheekbones, and have always loved the beauty marks, although the people of London do tend to stare.

I was tall for my age when I was kidnapped, but stopped growing after that and as a result stand at the unremarkable height of five feet, two inches. To tell the truth, I don’t quite hit that mark any longer. I keel to one side these days, and favour my right leg.

My toenails are yellow and crusted and thick and most resistant to trimming. These days, my toes lift rather than settling flat on the ground. No matter, as I have shoes, and I am not asked or required to run, or even to walk considerable distances.

By my bed, I like to keep my favourite objects. One is a blue glass pot of skin cream. Each night, I rub the cream over my ashen elbows and knees. After the life I have lived, the white gel seems like a magical indulgence. Rub me all the way in, it seems to say, and I will grant you and your wrinkles another day or two.

proud and that hint at my former beauty. The hands are long and dark and smooth, despite everything, and the nails are nicely embedded, still round, still pink. I have wondrously beautiful hands. I like to put them on things. I like to feel the bark on trees, the hair on children’s heads, and before my time is up, I would like to place those hands on a good man’s body, if the occasion arises. But nothing—not a man’s body, or a sip of whisky, or a peppered goat stew from the old country—would give anything like the pleasure I would take from the sound of a baby breathing in my bed, a grandchild snoring against me.

Sometimes, I wake in the morning with the splash of sunlight in my small room, and my one longing, other than to use the chamber pot and have a drink of tea with honey, is to lie back into the soft, bumpy bed with a child to hold. To listen to an infant’s voice rise and fall. To feel the magic of a little hand, not even fully aware of what it is doing, falling on my shoulder, my face.

These days, the men who want to end the slave trade are feeding me. They have given me sufficient clothes to ward off the London damp. I have a better bed than I’ve enjoyed since my earliest childhood, when my parents let me stuff as many soft grasses as I could gather under a woven mat. Not having to think about food, or shelter, or clothing is a rare thing indeed.

What does a person do, when survival is not an issue? Well, there is the abolitionist cause, which takes time and fatigues me greatly. At times, I still panic when surrounded by big white men with a purpose.

When they swell around me to ask questions, I remember the hot iron smoking above my breast.

Thankfully, the public visits are only so often and leave me time for reading, to which I am addicted like some are to drink or to tobacco. And they leave

My hands are the only part of me that still do me

45

me time for writing. I have my life to tell, my own private ghost story, and what purpose would there be to this life I have lived, if I could not take this opportunity to relate it? My hand cramps after a while, and sometimes my back or neck aches when I have sat for too long at the table, but this writing business demands little. After the life I have lived, it goes down as easy as sausages and gravy.

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary.

And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied.

MM: The book has opened up a new understanding about Black history for younger readers. There are now high school students in Canada participating in book clubs to read and learn more about this story.

LH: It’s just so fantastic. When I’ve gone in to speak at schools across Canada, which I’ve done dozens of times, frequently the only book on the curriculum having to do with Black history is To Kill a Mocking Bird. It’s so quintessentially Canadian that an American book that’s seven decades old by a white American is the one book that is used to expose Canadian students to Black history. It’s kind of sad in its myopia. Going into these schools and having an opportunity to talk about the book and seeing that some students in some schools are already reading and studying the book is incredibly gratifying. It means that the range of conversation about the story of Blacks in Canada and in the world opens up.

MM: What’s a day of writing like for you?

Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God’s existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by that pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning.

Once I have met with the King and told my story, I desire to be interred right here, in the soil of London.

Africa is my homeland. But I have weathered enough migrations for five lifetimes, thank you very much, and don’t care to be moved again.  From Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill Copyright © 2007 by Lawrence Hill. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton &

46

mosaicmagazine.org

LH: It depends on the cycle of a book. A writing day might be writing 10 hours if I’m in the thick of it, or it might be no writing at all from being on book tours in other countries. There can be about a six-year cycle: five of them are research and writing, and one of them is touring. And then, back to research and writing again.

I’m winding up the touring cycle and stepping into the writing cycle, and I’m busy working on a new book. Those days I’m getting up fairly early to write before the kids are up, and then getting them off to school, and then getting back to writing.

MM: You mentioned you have another book in the

works. Is it too preemptive to ask what that book is about?

LH: It’s a contemporary novel, purely imaginative, and it feels good to be writing on a purely imaginary basis. It’s more playful in terms of its style and story. 

was very important for me as a U.S. citizen, as a person of conscience, to speak out about that in the best way that I could, in any way possible. I did not feel that...I just knew that I did not want to have that era pass, and then say I had never said anything, or had stepped up, or done anything. I wanted to be able to say that I had at least stood up and said something.

GOLPHIN: In the introduction to Our Caribbean, you state that it is a book that “makes its own contribution to an ever-increasing conversation.” Is the collection supposed to give a voice to the Caribbean LGBT community?

GLAVE: That book shows how much creativity and thought there has been in the Caribbean; that many Caribbean people don’t want to acknowledge.

Many Caribbean scholars and writers don’t want to acknowledge it, but with that book, I felt, okay, whatever people feel, they can’t now say that we don’t exist, that we’re not here. 

47

influence on communities in The Bronx. Where is Bedford Stuyvesant and what kinds of changes are happening in that neighborhood because of gentrification today?

2) Discuss the title of each narrative and what it might mean.

3) Read the work of the writers Glave references in “Baychester: A Memory.”

4) Study and discuss the Chicano Movement in the United States. Talk about the place where Esperanza’s father works and the activism of Cesar Chavez.

What prevents her family from moving to a bigger house? Why does Esperanza think they will never leave Mango Street?

5) Discuss form: the novel, the vignette, the essay.

Which form of writing did you most enjoy reading?

Why? Which form do you think you’d most enjoy writing? Try to write an original work in the form you most admire. 

pared to share your work with the class. After each student share his or her story, talk about the content. Do the male students understand what young women experience as they become women? Do the female students understand the experiences of young men? Talk about what really goes on, and then free-write an answer to this question: What can men and women learn from each other as they talk about their coming-of-age experiences?

Additional Activities: 1) Read Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints and discuss the ways three generations of women come-of-age in her novel. 

9. Catherine McKinley’s The Book of Sarahs (coming-of-age) 10. Bruce Morrow’s Shade (anthology of work by gay men of African descent) 11. Bridgett Davis’ Shifting Through Neutral (coming-of-age)

is killed for being Black and another is killed for being gay? Is this one way the LGBT Movement is similar to the Civil Rights Movement?

5) Why does Marshall’s book document atrocities committed against Black people in North America and Africa? Why does Glave document the atrocities 

12. Martha Southgate’s The Fall of Rome (coming-of-age) 13. Junot Diaz’s Drown (coming-of-age, immigrant narratives) 14. Willie Perdomo’s Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (urban settings, poems of immigrant experiences) 15. Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging (coming-of-age in Hawaii) 

48

mosaicmagazine.org

Miss John ousts Staceyann from the house for defying her and getting a perm, a symbol of neatness and status among her friends. This only continues a cycle of making her feel undervalued as a girl child and unwanted. In spite of this, Staceyann becomes self-reliant based on her intellect and tenacity.

Staceyann Chin is also adept at describing the early moments of sexual awareness. Her conversation with Miss John’s son Glen about the definition of “batty boy” is telling, as is her encounter with photos of nude women and touching what she calls her “coco bread” for the first time. This sexuality is not limited to Staceyann’s own discoveries. The book also tells the truth about male privilege when her frail grandfather, who once abused her beloved grandmother, talks to her about preserving her virginity. Staceyann describes the tense, covert gay community in Jamaica that barely speaks in public or delves into real relationships for fear of ostracism and brutality.

shows how girls are often held to different standards within a family and are sexually harassed.

She explores sexual mores and the colorism that affects all communities of African descent through her own interracial Chinese and Jamaican heritage.

Jamaica is not necessarily a paradise for those who live there, and the town called Paradise is a contradiction of what the name implies. She manages a clear timeline of poignant and sometimes triumphant moments that ends with her departure to the United States for an open life with more opportunities. Chin carefully sets up the possibility for a follow-up memoir. After all, the story has not ended for the young girl with the sharp tongue cutting its way toward the stage as a widely known poet and performer. 

At times, young Staceyann strikes out as a precocious and defiant girl, yet whimsical as Pippi Longstocking. She does not back down, even as she shuffles from one place to another. Readers will want to see this determined girl succeed in school and thrive despite the absences created in her life by others. Her story illustrates how a person can make it if there are a few people who can encourage that person and if the person remains persistent, but this is no Horatio Alger story, nor is it a conventional narrative of coming to America from an immigrant’s point of view.

Instead, Chin complicates the story with clarity.

There are fluid shifts in and out of patois and sentences that do not reinterpret the vernacular heard in the voices of many people in this memoir. Chin

49

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip  One-Year Subscription: $15.00

 Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

 MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip  One-Year Subscription: $15.00

 Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

 MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463

SUBSCRIBE TO MOSAIC Name Address City/ST/Zip  One-Year Subscription: $15.00

 Two-Year Subscription: $25.00

 MAKE CHECK OR MONEY ORDER PAYABLE TO 50 mosaicmagazine.org Literary Freedom Project 314 W 231 St. #470 Bronx, NY 10463

AALBC.com, The African American Literature Book Club The #1 Site for Readers of Black Literature.

AALBC.com can help you find that next great read or advertise your book to an audience of avid readers.

Troy Johnson, President of AALBC.com, is available to answer your questions.

(866) 603-8394 - troy@aalbc.com 51

America’s beloved national storyteller Mary Monroe’s highly anticipated GOD Series continues...

From God Ain’t Blind “Look, you’ve made your point. I’ve messed up in a big way.” I sniffed, blinked, and groped for more words. I started talking out of the side of my mouth. “Pee Wee, I’m going to start going back to church more often,” I mumbled.

“Church?” He threw his head back and laughed long and loud. When he returned his attention to me, he had tears in his eyes. “Do you think that goin’ back to church is goin’ to get you off this hook? Huh?” I tried to answer, but I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“Annette, I got news for you. It ain’t goin’ to be that easy. Do you mean to stand here and tell me that you think you can do anything you want to do and run back to the church, and that will make everything right again? You know your Bible, so you know that Jezebel didn’t get off that easy, either!”

“I just thought—” “You done made a fool out of me and our marriage, not to mention yourself. But you can’t make no fool out of God. God ain’t blind. Every time you crawled into bed with that punk, God had his eye on you, woman.”

“You didn’t have to go there! This is not judgment day,” I had the nerve to say. “What…what do you want me to do, Pee Wee?”

ALSO AVAILABLE:

MARY MONROE LOOK FOR MARY IN THE FOLLOWING CITIES: Oakland, CA/ San Francisco, CA & the Bay Area Chicago, IL

52

Louisville, KY Memphis, TN Dallas, TX Detroit, MI

mosaicmagazine.org

Charlotte, NC Columbia, SC Norfolk, VA Baltimore, MD

For updated tour schedule dates & locations, visit www.Kensingtonbooks.com/MaryMonroe

TO REQUEST A GALLEY OR ELECTRONIC EXCERPT, PLEASE EMAIL PUBLICITY@KENSINGTONBOOKS.COM An imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.

Visit us at www.kensingtonbooks.com and www.marymonroe.org