Good reading 2

Last year and much of this year I did very little posting on my website.  But I read voraciously.  I found myself not just reading newer releases but also books that had been out for decades that I had somehow missed.  I tend to read a few books at once, always in different genres.  I’ll put up short lists every week or so of some of the books that have helped me to grow.  

Memoir- All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Ned Cobb 1885-1973) transcribed by Theodore Rosengarten  

Ned Cobb was a sharecropper in Alabama who parents were born into slavery.  He had a harsh life and despite very limited schooling was not only wise but also a union activist, loving father and husband, and proud man who gave and got respect not only from Blacks but from whites in the Jim Crow South. Rosengarten set up a microphone and let the man talk. Later Rosengarten transcribed and ordered the interview sessions and created the book. He renamed Cobb Shaw and the book became a best seller. Years later Cobb’s grandchildren sued and won a suit asking for royalties since their grandfather had provided all the text.  The book is a really engaging read and gives an eloquent picture of the south and “how we got ovah.”  

“If you don’t like what I have done, then you are against the man I am today. I ain’t going to take no backwater about it. If you don’t like me for the way I have lived, get off in the woods and bushes and shut your mouth and let me go for what I’m worth. And if I come out of my scrapes, all right; if I don’t come out, don’t let it worry you, this is me…”  

I found myself not only having great affection for Nate Shaw nee Ned Cobb but seeing him as a real hero.  

Nonfiction Literature: The Breast of the Earth: A survey of the History and Culture of Africa South of the Sahara by Kofi Awooner  

Beginning with a brief history of Sub-Saharan Africa before Europeans or North Africans entered West Arica Awooner offers an intriguing look at how culture developed and how slavery and colonialism distorted and dismissed much of it. The poet in me was fascinated by the intricacies of oral poetry. He explains concepts like the oriki or praise poems in terms of what is to be covered in certain lines and how images, ideals and religious traditions are woven into the poem “ In a praise poem to Ogun he explains how “it opens with a declaration of god’s capacity for killing…” Gives “Ogun’s attributes  from line 9 to line 31” and later gives prayers and supplication lines 32 to 41.  We modern day poets often put so much into how the line falls on the page, where it breaks, how white space is arranged. But here we get to see the high art of an oral tradition where the poets must, like young people of today sometimes do, flow. But in the traditional poetry that flow had many rules and points one had to hit.  He points out the lyricism of the verses and the creative use of imagery and metaphor.  

“The greenness which kisses that of a gall-bladder

Butterfly of Phunga, tinted with circling spots,

As if made by the twilight from the shadows of mountains

In the dusk of the evening, when wizards are abroad.

(James Stuart and D. Malcolm, Izibongo” Zulu Praise Poems (London, Oxford University Press, pg 136.)  

The book is well resourced and foot-noted and an interesting read. It reaches into modern literature going as far as Tutuola and his use of Yoruba folklore to create a really African novel, to Achebe who is known for his examinations of modern Africa and the effects of colonialism to Ferdinand Oyono and the anticolonial novel.  He also deconstructs some African playwrights.  If you want to understand and indeed respect the evolution of literature in Africa this is a stunning book to read.  

Fiction: Memoirs of a Woman Doctor – Nawal El Saadawi

Who Arab women are and how they have agency in their countries is full of cliches and ethnocentrism in much of the West.  El Saadawi in her short and memorable novel takes a young girl and shows how she achieves her dreams of becoming a doctor and navigates her way into and out of what turned out to be a bad marriage eventually building herself a fulfilling life.  This is a book that quietly speaks to women’s rights and liberation in an Arabic context. Western feminists would do well to rad the compelling books of this author before trying to paint their western ideas of what a liberated woman is and how she can attain that liberation through a near-sighted western lens.  

Early in the novel as a young woman she has her first major act of rebellion entering a hair salon.

“I watched the long tresses squirm in the jaws of the sharp scissors and then fall to the ground. Were these what my mother called a woman’s crowning glory? Could a woman’s crown fall shattered to the ground like this because of one moment of determination? I was filled with a great contempt for womankind: I had seen with my own eyes that women believe in useless trivia. This contempt gave me added strength, I walked back home with a firm step and stood squarely in front of my mother with my newly cropped hair.”   

What I enjoyed about this book was the protagonist’s evolution and growing understandings of compromises some women are forced to make and the personal cost to her after creating another, much lonelier road for herself and her difficult but significant triumph.    

Poetry The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy: Rites of Passage, Masks, Islands  Edward Kamau Brathwaite

 Kwame Nkrumah once said “I am not African because I was born in Africa but because Africa was born in me.”   When I read Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020) I realize that is his truth too. This volume is an exciting spread of his work. It is music African diaspora, Africa, and home, it is family, ancestors, neighbors, and strangers, it is island and sea rock and people. Reading this book was different than reading some of the slimmer volumes of his work.  I was able to see patterns emerge and discern a spirit that was as ancient as it was modern. 

In his poem The Making pf the Drum you can understand the sacredness of the act and the way that music is drawn from and reflective of nature.

Section 4. Gourds and Rattles begins:

 Cal-
 abash trees’
 leaves
  
 do not clash; 
 bear a green
 gourd, burn
 copper in the
 light, crack
 open seeds
 that rattle. 

He creates music with is word choices, line breaks, thoughtful enjambments. Barbadian patois, African languages, standard English, engage the subjects with both simplicity and dense images which dance through these poems written over fifty years ago.   

In Pebbles (Part IV of Limbo” he asserts a recurring theme of his home it’s strength and fragilities.

  But my island is a pebble,
 
 If you crack an egg
 watching its black jagged grin,
 a glue of life exudes
 a sticky death.
  
 You cannot crack a pebble,
 it exudes
 death. Seeds will not
 take root on its cool sur-
  
 face. It is a duck’s back
 of water. A knife will not snap
 it open, It will slay
 giants
  
 but never bear children. 

Certainly, Brathwaite has written much fine work since the publication of this volume which demonstrates his ongoing evolution as poet and person, but this compendium of older work is incredibly rich.

SO, if you are looking for a good book to read that may not be new but is new to you, consider one of these.