books
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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley My rating: 5 of 5 stars I thought about writing a review of this book but when I finished it, I read the back cover text and saw this quote by Edwidge Danticat. It says what I feel about it so aptly, there is no…
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1. The Cane Fields There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp, the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General searches for a word; he is all the world there is. Like a parrot imitating spring, we lie down screaming as…
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Animals were once, for all of us, teachers. They instructed us in ways of being and perceiving that extended our imaginations, that were models for additional possibilities. We watched them make their way through the intricacies of their lives with wonder and with awe.
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Living in the shadow of Elmina Castle, the first European building south of the Sahara, built in 1482 by the Portuguese and then occupied by the Dutch (and now a UNESCO World Heritage site for its importance in the transatlantic slave trade) was a small community of former Dutch army conscripts who had served in…
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From the chapter The Language of African Literature: […] African languages refused to die. They would not simply go the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about the international conferences. These languages, these national heritages of Africa, were kept alive by the peasantry. The peasantry…
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Citizen, enemy, mama’s boy, sucker, utter garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht; a scalp so often scalded with boiled water that the puny brain feels completely cooked. Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden rubble which you now arrive to sift. All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven. Also: we didn’t…
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All the single mothers, black and nonblack, who raise healthy sons who later become mature, responsible men capable of giving and receiving love know that it is a lie that only men can raise sons. Patriarchal culture currently seeks to devalue single mothers by insisting they cannot raise healthy sons, even though there is no…
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and…
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Nadine Gordimer is an effective writer. So effective, in fact that I have found myself, over the past few days, researching Afrikaner resistance to Afrikaner Nationalism. One of the first books I read that dealt with the subject was 117 days by Ruth First. On the strength of the literature, I found myself questioning whether it was…
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Elsewhere on the African continent, mission-educated men took power as Africa emerged from direct European colonial rule. The list is long. Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, now a member of the Academie Francaise, is a former seminarian and a leading Catholic intellectual. The late Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the Ivorian president who constructed the world’s…
Tichaona Chinyelu 
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