Lost in language & Sound - Ntozake Shange

Lost in Language & Sound by Ntozake Shange
This collection of essays was released earlier this month. Essays are usually hit or miss for me,overall this collection worked very well for me. I especially loved the first half, in which much of it read like a homage to African American dance,dancers Jazz. I only recognized a few of the dancers mentioned, I did a little better with the Jazz artist (though barely). But it did not matter either way, Ntozake Shange wrote in such a way that it made me feel like I knew them, or at the very least I felt their love of movement and that was more then a enough. The author reminisces about the beginning of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered When the Rainbow is Enuf. One of the messages I got from this collection was that you can try to steal or silence the African Americans but we will always new way to speak and be heard, be it through dance, music or any other artistic avenue of our choice.

"We must sing and dance or we shall die an inert, motionless, "sin ritmo" death. "Negros muertos," killed by a culture afraid of who we are and what we have to say with our bodies, our music, and our brains. Black folks do have brains. We even have ideologists, scholars, choreographers, and always the grace of the goods. "

Reading this collection reminded me how much I love Ntozake Shange's work, there's a beautiful rhythm to her words which always have purpose. The author reveals much of herself in each piece. I truly enjoyed this lost in language & sound, though I did question the inclusion of one piece entitled "2 live crew" Black men demoralizing Black women is still an issue but I just felt the exploration of 2 live crews exploits was dated. Its in inclusion always halted a bit of the flow of the collection. However I still highly recommend lost language & sound without missing a beat.

2011 National Book Award Winners And Giller Prize Winner

The National Book Award Winners were recently announced of the four winners three were female authors of color.

Jesymn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Fiction)
Nikkey Finney for Head off & Spilt (Poetry)
Thanhha Lai for Inside Out & Back Again (Young People's Lit)

Esi Edugyan, was the winner of the 2011 Giller Prize (a distinguished Canadian literary award) for Half Blood Blues. The novel was also shorlisted for Man Booker Prize. Unfortunately it won't be available in the States until March though if you can't wait you buy it now via amazon uk.

Much congratulations to Ward, Finney, Lai and Edugyan This congratulatory post is a tad late and I'd to look at it as more of a strategic delay as opposed to being too busy. I am anxiously awaiting the release of all the best of list for this year. If they are lacking in female authors of color I will be very dissappointed and will revisit this post to cheer me up and this one.

Vote For Silver Sparrow And Congratulations to Jesmyn Ward

Tayari Jones novel Silver Sparrow has made it the semifinals round of Goodreads Choice Awards for Best fiction as a write in. If you loved Silver Sparrow and you haven't done so already head over to Goodreads to vote for it and please spread the word. If you are not a goodreads member it takes five seconds to join. Voting for the Semifinal round ends on November 20th.

The 2011 National Book Award winners were recently announced. Jesmyn Ward was awarded the NBA for fiction for her novel Salvage the Bones. Congratulations to Ward, Salvage the Bones is a wonderful story and this is well deserved recognition

Thoughts on Heidi W. Durrow's The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

Heidi W. Durrow

256 pages

Publication Year: 2010

Publisher: Algonquin

Source: Bought it

It’s a funny thing to think about: moving toward extinction. And I think of how maybe I’m already extinct in a strange way – there’s no way to make another me: at least I can’t do it. But that doesn’t matter anyway because I never want to have kids.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is the debut novel from Heidi W. Durrow. It’s also the winner of the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, which was founded by Barbara Kingsolver.

The story tells the life of Rachel, the only survivor of tragic, mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of her three siblings and their mother. Rachel is also biracial, the daughter of a white Danish mother and African-American father. After the death of her family members, Rachel is sent to live with her paternal grandmother and has to learn how to navigate in a country where she’s considered black, something she didn’t think much about before. Told from the perspective of Rachel, her mother Nella, and those who knew her family, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is an engaging read of one girl’s struggle to live after the death of those she loved most.

This year I’m learning a lot about my reading. I’ve learned that I don’t read many books that feature:

· the elderly as protagonists

· mother-daughter relationships

· bi-racial characters

Where have I been? In today’s society with so many people being of several races and cultures, I can’t believe I’ve ignored this. Luckily reading this book brought it to my attention. As a young girl, not only does Rachel has to deal with everything that has happened, she also has to learn how to deal with so much attention to both who she is physically, her long fuzzy hair that makes girls in her class want to fight her, blue eyes, and light brown skin to who she is as a person, someone who loves to read and tries to understand what being black means in America during the 1980s.

The problem is that as interesting and engaging as the book was, I didn’t connect very well to Rachel. Readers understand this character through her words and interactions with others but it wasn’t enough.

I had the same problem with Rachel’s mother, Nella. Nella is a young Danish woman living in Europe when she meets Roger, an African-American man stationed at a nearby base. They soon marry and have children before Nella leaves Roger and flees to the United States with their children. She struggles with everything before she finally makes a terrifying decision.

*spoiler spoiler I need to understand her decision with the same depth that I understood a similar decision in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. *spoiler over

Though I didn’t get the connection I needed, I still think this was an excellent read. My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

This review was originally posted at 1330v.