• Reading Matters

    The public library has become my new bookstore. Yesterday, I went book shopping there and got the following books: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter If you know me, then you know I am in no way, shape or form, a supporter of mainstream politics, let along presidents of the united states, former or…

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  • I don’t know if the Heinneman African Writer Series (AWS) was one of those Chess record label deals where the artists didn’t get paid according to the value of their work to the music appreciating audience but rather according to the skinflint economics of record label owners. I haven’t researched it so I can’t say.…

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  • House of Sand and Fog

    The House of Sand and Fog engaged me from the opening lines when I encountered Massoud Amir Behrani, a colonel under the former Shah of Iran. Now an immigrant in the San Francisco Bay Area, he works back-breaking jobs while trying to maintain the illusion that he, his wife and two children fled Iran upon…

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  •                                                                                                                                                                                                “You hearers, seers, imaginers, thinkers, rememberers, you prophets called to communicate truths of the living way to a people fascinated unto death, you called to link memory with forelistening, to join the uncountable seasons of our flowing to unknown tomorrows even more numerous, communicators doomed to pass on truths of our origins to a…

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  • Taking the book solely at face value, Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol are verses concerned with the disintegration of the marriage of Lawino, a rural African (Acoli) woman and Ocol, her western-educated husband. However, peeling back the cover of the words even a tiny bit reveals a woman committed to her indigenous culture…

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  • Our women must not pull back in the face of the many different aspects of their struggle, which leads them to courageously and proudly take full charge of their own lives and discover the happiness of being themselves, not the domesticated female of the male. Today, many women still seek the protective cover of a…

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  • Links and Things

    One of the blogs I follow is Kinna Reads. Today I received in my inbox the following: Link Gems. The gems included Chimamanda Adichie on Ama Ata Aidoo, an essay about the relationship between Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Homer’s Odyssey. As someone who finds herself interested in the interplay of European classics and Black literature,…

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  •   “I recently read Diwata, the most recent book of poems by Barbara Jane Reyes (published 2010 by BOA Editions. I found it a many-layered, profoundly moving work. Like Reyes’s earlier book Poeta en San Francisco (which I’ve written about previously in this blog, here), Diwata weaves together multiple undercurrents of experience and perception, mingling…

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  • Rigoberta Menchu

    Biography: Rigoberta Menchú Tum (born 9 January 1959, Laj Chimel, El Quiché, Guatemala) is an indigenous Guatemalan, of the K’iche’ ethnic group. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the plight of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country. She received the 1992…

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  • Historical fiction is one of my favorite genres – as I frequently approach history through literature. So it was with excitement that I opened Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I knew next to nothing about the backdrop to the novel, the Biafra war. I definitely didn’t know that it was Igbo-based. However,…

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