Tag: literature

New York, Ten Years Later

Published on by redict239Leave a comment

Attending the inaugural New York Black and African Literature Festival in September was the perfect excuse to revisit Harlem after ten years. And the three-day festival organized by author and poet Efe Paul Azino continually served literary vibes during my stay.

Because I chose a hotel in Midtown, I was able to experience large swaths of the city each day as I made my way uptown.

With the theme “Radical Solidarities,” it’s not surprising that one of the first panels I attended on Friday focused on coalition building. Dr Saudi García, a medical anthropologist, Samson Itodo, a Nigerian author and community organizer, and Omar Freilla, a social justice organizer discussed a wealth of themes relevant to the social challenges we face today. They described organizing as a way of life and a spiritual calling as they exchanged ideas about environmental resistance, the need for cooperatives and the necessity for unconventional alliances.

On Saturday, I attended the Radical Press panel which was a definite highlight. Speakers included Sean Jacobs from Africa is a Country, Bhakti Shringarpure from War Scapes Magazine, and the inimitable Ainehi Edoro of Brittle Paper. I was elated to hear all three speakers and to meet Dr. Edoro in person, especially since I’ve written a few book reviews for her admirable magazine. This trio of editors and publishers discussed how they founded their magazines around 2009/2010. They spoke on the current decline of corporate media and the need to take over spaces being abandoned by the mainstream. While Bhakti questioned even the role of independent media in the current paradigm, Jacobs emphasized how he stopped reacting to bad press in the West and made the decision to appoint more editors to cover the African continent.

On Sunday, I listened as journalist Howard French spoke about his latest book The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide with Kola Tuboson. Finally having the opportunity to hear this prolific author speak in person and discuss not just the role of Nkrumah in the development of Pan Africanism but also the diaspora wars amongst Blacks on the continent and in the Americas was definitely a highlight for me.

My insights here give just a small sample of the panels and readings I attended. There were several others that, in the spirit of the festival, brought together Africans from the continent, African Americans, and people of African descent from England and the Caribbean as well.

Ten years ago, when I visited New York, I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge on foot under the hot August sun. During this visit and once the festival ended, I did the same with the goal of visiting the Center for Fiction. The air was cooler this time, but the trek was just as challenging. During the same days that the Black and African Literature Festival was taking place, the Center for Fiction was hosting the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. As always, New York City was serving more events than I could possibly take in. So, I missed that one. But I still visited the Center to buy an anthology of short stories on Gaza and a bookmark depicting the Chrysler Building so I could carry a piece of the city back with me as yet another fond memory.

The LA Opera and Memories of Fascism: Federico Garcia Lorca, Neruda, Hemingway

Published on by redict239Leave a comment

Would you flee a fascist state?

Given the current state of US political affairs, I was left to ponder that question as I watched the LA Opera production of “Ainadamar” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillon downtown. In the opera, the character who plays actress Margarita Xirgu tries to convince her friend Federico García Lorca – a poet, playwright, and theater director — to flee Spain as the country hurdles towards civil war. She goes into exile, but the poet refuses to leave. Xirgu then engages with the audience to tell the tragedy surrounding García Lorca’s last days during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939.

Why Federico García Lorca?

Upon hearing about this opera, I was compelled to see it. As I state in my hybrid memoir manuscript, I first learned about Federico García Lorca at age sixteen when my AP Spanish Literature teacher introduced me to two poets who had a lasting impact on my own bilingual poetry – García Lorca and Pablo Neruda.

García Lorca is the most prominent Spanish writer of the early twentieth century. Born in 1898 in Granada, Spain and assassinated in 1936, his literary influences were futurism, symbolism, and surrealism. While doing recent research on his life, I realized authorities have given various reasons for his death. Most prominent amongst them is the fact that he was gay and a socialist in a country that was moving further and further to the right.

Was the Spanish Civil War a proxy war?

I am a fan of hybrid memoir, so literature inevitably leads me to history. Because I read the book The Red Flag by David Priestland a few years ago, I reflected on the historical context of the opera as I watched the L.A. production. From Priestland, I learned how the far right in Spain gained more popularity as Hitler consolidated power in and around Germany. Before World War II, Spain, France, and Chile had formed popular front governments to combat fascism. The Spanish left had one of the most successful popular fronts – communists, socialists, and left liberals — in the Western world, and they won the 1936 election.

Regrettably, the leftist victory of the Spanish Popular Front was short lived because General Francisco Franco staged a coup in 1936, the year García Lorca was assassinated. The country endured three torturous years of civil war fought not only by its citizens but also by volunteers from over fifty countries. The fascist governments of Germany and Italy supported Franco while Stalin sent arms to the political left.

While doing recent research, I learned new details about the quickly shifting politics of 1930’s Spain. I knew from Priestland that Picasso became a card-carrying communist during the civil war era. But I also discovered that Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda was on diplomatic duty in Spain where he met García Lorca. Like Picasso, Neruda became radicalized as a communist, but he also lost his diplomatic post due to his beliefs. The Chilean poet also met Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo and attended the 1937 Second International Writers Conference that Hemingway attended.

Despite the valiant efforts of the leftist resistance and the toil of a civil war that cut short 500,000 lives, the General gained control of the country. Franco banned García Lorca’s writing until 1953 — interestingly, the year Joseph Stalin died — and maintained his dictatorship until 1975.

A surprise for me was learning that after many years of tragic war and decades of dictatorship, García Lorca’s remains have never been found.

The LA Opera’s production of “Ainadamar” — conducted by Lina González-Granados of Colombia and choreographed by Antonio Najarro of Spain – was excellent. I appreciate how it put this history and García Lorca’s art on a Los Angeles stage for us to remember and reflect on the importance of resisting the destruction and dehumanization of far-right politics.

Why Samuel Beckett: A Black Writer’s Perspective

Published on by redict239Leave a comment

Studying Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett during junior year at UCLA was the final straw that pushed me towards mental and emotional exhaustion. I had overextended myself academically by taking too many classes during spring and summer quarters; and, studying Beckett in the fall led to questioning my Catholic faith and having to take a quarter off from my studies.

When I heard that OR books was publishing a hybrid memoir titled Beckett’s Children by Michael Coffey, I rushed to pre-order it. Coffey’s memoir, published in July this year, offered a sense of relief because I had worried that the allusions to a modernist writer in my memoir manuscript might seem a bit dated. But here was a memoir published in 2024 proving me wrong.

Unlike Coffey’s book, there are no continuous references to Beckett in my manuscript. Studying Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is pivotal to the inciting incident in chapter one because it causes me to doubt my faith. In Beckett’s Children, on the other hand, the author’s inciting incident centers around the idea that the Irish author may have fathered the American poet, Susan Howe.

Threads running through Coffey’s hybrid memoir include the stated curiosity about a familial bond between Beckett and Howe, Coffey’s literary research on the two writers, his own history as an adoptee, and his relationship with his son who is a three-time felon and addict.  In my manuscript, I weave in the history of Black Los Angeles beginning with the founding of the city by the Spanish.

Coffey’s description of airports and prisons as structures distinguished by their “architecture of waiting” stood out to me. This description was impactful because I’m familiar with Professor David Harvey’s description of the revolutionary potential of airport workers who are a class in themselves with the potential of becoming a class for themselves. In contrast, prisoners are the most captive humans on US soil; and prison is where the US Government has sent revolutionaries, such as members of the Black Power Movement and the Black Panther Party. So, I found the analogy of prisons and airports interesting because the two structures can also be considered exact opposites.

I recommend Beckett’s Children because one or more of the four narrative lines the author weaves into his hybrid memoir will grab your interest and pull you through the author’s skillful storytelling until the last page.