A well-informed, biting analysis of the legacy of empire.
In these probing essays, Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker Dangarembga examines the impacts of racism, colonialism, and patriarchy on her life and work.
Born in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, she grew up in “a vicious society that constructed me as essentially lacking full humanity, needing but never able, as a result of being black-embodied, to attain the status of complete human.” It was a world still shaped by the slave trade, which wrenched “the strongest and most able-bodied individuals in their communities” and upended traditional social and political structures. Even after gaining independence, the country suffered from the wounds of “imperial lust,” including inequality, rule by a racial elite, and an entrenched patriarchal structure “particularly reluctant to recognise the achievement of Zimbabwean women in any sector that it does not control.” As a young child, Dangarembga and her brother were left with a White foster family in Dover, while her parents furthered their studies in London. In England, disoriented and lonely, she first became aware of her Blackness. The author recounts her evolution as a feminist, beginning in college in Zimbabwe and the U.K. “Feminist theory,” she writes, “showed me how I was constructed as a female person whose content and possibility was predetermined, and how my refusal to occupy that space was a form of rebellion, albeit a powerless one.” She felt that powerlessness as she strived to get published and, after studying at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, faced marginalization in the film industry as well. As a Black feminist, Dangarembga feels part of “a small, often embattled group” struggling to be heard in a society that wants to silence her. In her work, she seeks “to raise mountains, hills, escarpments and rocky outcrops over the gouges in my history, my societies and their attendant spirits.”
A well-informed, biting analysis of the legacy of empire.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64445-211-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Crafted with honesty and wry comedic flair, these essays are both engaging and enraging.
Powerful essays offers an incisive glimpse into life as a Black man in America.
In this collection, Walker demonstrates the keen intellect and direct style that characterized his acclaimed 2010 memoir, Street Shadows. In an account of how he was racially profiled by a security guard at Emerson College, where he teaches creative writing, the author deftly combines both humor and humanity without obscuring the impact of such experiences on him as a husband, father, son, and educator. “The stories I favor,” he writes, “are not only upsetting but also uplifting; they are rich with irony and tinged with humor; they are unique, in some way, and lend themselves to interesting digressions, and their protagonists always confront villains, even if not always with success—when I come into a race story with these components, I prefer to delay its telling, allowing it to breathe, so to speak, like a newly uncorked Merlot.” Walker candidly considers his struggles discussing race with his children; clearly depicts the racism embedded in restaurant seating arrangements; and expressively recounts the terrifying spiral of fear, anger, and distress he experienced after seeking medical attention for his son, who had suffered multiple seizures. The author’s no-nonsense, few-words-wasted approach lends itself just as readily to an account of the exhilaration he and his siblings felt while watching the The Jackson 5ive cartoon in their family’s religious household in 1971: “Breaking the Sabbath was a violation of God’s law, pretty significant stuff, but then so, too, was an all-Negro cartoon.” In the moving “Dragon Slayers,” Walker shows how James Alan McPherson, an instructor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, changed his outlook and approach as a writer. “My stories showed people being affected by drug addiction, racism, poverty, murder, crime, violence,” he writes, “but they said nothing about the spirit that, despite being confronted with what often amounted to certain defeat, would continue to struggle and aspire for something better.”
Crafted with honesty and wry comedic flair, these essays are both engaging and enraging.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5599-5
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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