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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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Listen
To The People
THE NEO-GRIOT NEW ORLEANS
PROJECT
from
Kalamu ya Salaam
We will go to the shelters and far-flung
communities where significant numbers of exiled New Orleanians
are now residing. We will collect their stories—not simply
their memories of escaping our flooded city, but also a social
profile of who they are, what their day-to-day lives were, what
were their hopes and dreams, their challenges and struggles.
Too often when major historic events take place, those who live
at the margins of the mainstream are ignored. We know what the
presidents and generals did, we know what the business leaders
and major cultural figures thought, but do we know anything
about the poor, the disenfranchised, the people of the Dome, the
overpass, as well as those who left the city on Sunday and as of
Tuesday night had no city to return to?
During the Great Depression the WPA collected the stories of
people who had experienced slavery. Today we will collect the
stories of people who survived a defining moment in American and
World History.
We are neo-griots. Griot refers to the traditional West African
historians/story-tellers/musicians. Neo refers to digital
technology. Our goal is to write, to record, to photograph and
video the stories of survival, and to share these stories with
the world via the internet.
The project will be led by Kalama ya Salaam, a New Orleans
native, internationally recognized as a cultural historian and
creative writer. Among his many accomplishments, he was the
Executive Director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage
Foundation from 1983 to 1987, and was serving as the co-director
of Students at the Center, a creative writing program in the New
Orleans public schools. Salaam taught writing and digital video.
As the editor of the Black Collegian magazine (1970 - 1983),
Salaam published over a hundred interviews. He was also a member
of the Free Southern Theatre, which toured the Deep South. For
the last ten years, Salaam has been leading the Neo-Griot
Workshop, a weekly gathering of New Orleans writers of color.
In 1998 Salaam founded E-Drum, a daily listserv built around the
interests of Black writers and diverse supporters of Black
literature worldwide. In June of 2005, Salaam and his son, Mtume
ya Salaam, began Breath of Life (kalamu.com/bol ), a website
conversation about Black music.
Salaam is uniquely prepared to lead this project. Moreover, he
has identified New Orleans writers and artists who are prepared
to enter the field and interface with the thousands of New
Orleanians in exile.
The objective is:
1. to put the words and images of the people on the internet via
a New Orleans Project website.
2. to teach the respondents how to access the internet, so that
they can continue sharing their views after the neo-griots
leave.
3. to archive the resulting information so that it can be
researched and accessed worldwide.
We invite your support of our project.
Kalama
kalamu.salaam@gmail.com posted 7 September 2005
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) / Gil Scott-Heron
& His Music Gil Scott
Heron Blue Collar
Remember Gil Scott- Heron |
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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
1950
1960
1965
1970
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1985
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2000
____ 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
17 April 2012
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