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AFRO-DISIAC
By Jane
Musoke-Nteyafas
Like kings
They carry their
Mother earth blackness
Diaspora darkness/Indigo darkness
Suede black skins/Purple dark skins
Coffee cultured/Caffeine coloured
Orange/yellow/gold skins
Cooked chocolate colours
Caramel crème colours
Canvas crafted colours
These men are
Aphrodisiacal Africa essences.
Like kings
They seduce
With their nectar sweet lips
Sugar plums shaped lips
Melanin coated eyes
And knotted Africa hair.
They carry the pride of
Sankofa/ Senghor/Selassie
Lumumba/ Kenyatta/ Nkrumah/
In their stance.
These men are
Aphrodisiacal Africa essences.
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Written Sunday 19th
June 2005
posted 30 March 2006 |
Jane
Musoke-Nteyafas, poet/author/artist and
playwright, was born in Moscow, Russia and currently
resides in Toronto, Canada. She is the daughter of
retired diplomats. By the time she was 19, she spoke
French, English, Spanish, Danish, Luganda, some
Russian and had lived in Russia, Uganda, France,
Denmark, Cuba and Canada. She won the Miss
Africanada beauty pageant 2000 in Toronto where she
was also named ‘one of the new voices of Africa’
after reciting one of her poems. In 2004 she was
published in T-Dot Griots-An Anthology of Toronto's
Black storytellers and in February 2005 her art
piece Namyenya was featured as the poster piece for
the Human Rights through Art-Black History Month
Exhibit.
She is the
recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, art,
and playwriting and is becoming a household name in
Toronto circles. She is a columnist for Bahiyah
Woman Magazine and is also a fellow for the Crossing
Borders-British Council Writers Programme.
www.nteyafas.com
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
2 January 2012
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