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Books by Kalamu ya
Salaam
The Magic of JuJu: An Appreciation of the Black Arts
Movement /
360:
A Revolution of Black Poets
Everywhere Is Someplace Else: A Literary Anthology
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From A Bend in the River: 100 New Orleans Poets
Our Music Is No Accident /
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
My Story My Song (CD)
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"I'm in Nashville"
Kalamu Update
folks,
i'm in nashville, well, actually somewhere in the suburbs
(please spare me the jokes, the suburbs are not funny)...
anyway, looks like this will be the base for the near future
although everything is fluid and that could change.
no mailing address yet.
cell phone is back in service: it's a long story, let's just say
my old phone&pda died. i left a new phone in houston. now
have a new new phone here in nashville. the number is the same.
504/710-9694
some folk have been asking about making donations. paypal (kalamu@aol.com)
is the most efficient way. other than that, email me.
if you get a email bounce back because my box is full, wait
about twelve hours and try again. right now i do not have
24-hour access to the internet, which i did have in houston,
which was why i could keep e-drum humming with no interruption,
but now, out here in the sticks... don't get me started.
within a week or so, we should be in an apartment and then we'll
have the stuff hooked up, meanwhile it's 10:30pm, i'm sitting in
a barnes & noble paying approximately $4 for two hours of
wireless hookup. i tried just walking into a couple of hotel
lobbies. that didn't work--the marriott had wireless in the
lobby but only for hotel guests, wouldn't even sell me any
airtime. oh, the joys of nashville.
i'm getting this off now, so technically this is the friday
e-drum. and i will do another mailing on saturday.
my daughter asante is going to be the manager for the
"listen to the people" project, which includes
managing my speaking engagements, residencies, lectures, etc.
we're ramping up for me to be active on the road over the next
six or seven weeks, raising funds for listen to the people and
for to keep a roof over my head and a broadband connection under
the roof—actually the roof is not nearly as important as the
broadband. we're about to go verizon on folk and i will have
24/7 broadband wherever i go. more on that in a minute...
meanwhile, i am not intentionally ignoring people, i'm just
swamped with work. articles to write. e-drum to keep up with.
last week we had a thousand emails in a two day period. and aol
just quit at that point. plus, preparing for listen to the
people, as well as working on sac (students at the center)
matters, and other writing i've been doing (which includes a
major novel: walkin' blues--a meditation and speculation on
the life and legend of robert johnson). i'm about 120,000
words into the novel and hope to finish by the end of the year.
i'm going to be more elusive than ever because i will be
traveling like crazy, but please bear with me. i love all of
yall, thanks for all the support. we are pushing on. my health
is good. and most days my head is ok too.
check out the KAT ACTION piece i've put out. i'm talking about a
real tax break.
and, the neo-griot stuff just keeps rolling right along. little
did we know that all the study and stuff we were doing in new
orleans would be brought to bear with us far flung from each
other physically but working together in cyberspace.
more in a minute, plan to spend quite a bit of time writing and
touching base with folk tomorrow.
i apologize to all the folk i have not contacted or followed up
with to date, things have just been moving too fast for me to
catch hold to everything.
more in a minute, the next e-drum will be coming at you in a
matter of hours.
a luta continua,
kalamu
posted 10 September 2005
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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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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 16 January 2012
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