National Black Arts Alliance

African fever: performing ‘Africa’ in Europe

An exhibition of photographs by Jessica Kendall from one of the many African themed circuses which toured Europe in 2008.

Date: 21st January - 27th March 2010
Time: 10.30am - 5pm
Venue: Brunei Gallery, SOAS, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG
Tickets: Free
Info: SOAS website

Black Water Rising by Attica Lott
Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail (12 Nov 2009)
ISBN-10: 1846687292
ISBN-13: 978-1846687297
£12.99

There is something about big books that takes my memory back; the first day of school term and the feeling of dread as reading material were distributed. So, it is my childish aversion to anything over 250 pages that meant I was slow in starting this remarkable achievement by Attica Locke.

This is a page-turning story lead by a veteran of the Black Power Movement who is now an attorney but, as he tells himself, “It is only your mind that can’t move out of the prison of the past” .However much he might believe this, Jay Peterson’s day continues to place him on the other side - the Black side - of a white-controlled society.

I read one review that berated Attica’s style of writing. The further I got into the story the more I understood why the critic was so nasty. Attica gives the reader so much background history of the Civil Rights before and after the Panthers and I appreciated that as much as Mr Critic obviously did not.

Black Water Rising is a murder story amidst employment, unrest and continual racial disharmony. I got through it on the gallop and am eager to read more, for this is her first novel and there has to be even better further down the road.

SuAndi

The Front Room
Author Michael McMillan
ISBN13: 978 1 906155 85 8 £19.95
Black Dog Publishing

The front room is much more than an ethnographic account of homes in migrant groups. For the readers who see the pictures and remember the ‘Gram’ and the doyleys, the slamming of domino’s and the kitsch styles of the period, it is also a portal to childhood memories and family get-together’s that took place in the sacred ‘front room.’ Memories of special times and relatives who are now gone are evoked by the journey we are taken on in this unique publication. I presented this book to other African-Caribbean brother and sister of that period and it facilitated much discussion and a mixture of emotions, as everyone had a story to tell about those tough times, with parents trying to make do and build a future in aliens lands. Through the living room, we see hopes and dreams, some unrealised and a people who worked hard to make the country what it is. We came seeking gold, but it was cold and only had the paraffin heater to illuminate the psychedelic carpet and clashing walls. Michael’s images in this publication had turned the Kitsch into gold and positive memories. Thanks for the memories.

© KEVIN DALTON JOHNSON – Sculptor

RACISM ON THE VICTORIAN STAGE – REPRESENTATION OF SLAVERY AND THE BLACK CHARACTER BY HAZEL WATERS
ISBN 978-0-521-10755-6

When you pick up a book which has Cambridge University Press on the back as the publisher and a title as long as this on the front, you know you’re in for a fairly high-brow ride of a reading. And this indeed does exactly what it says on the tin and provides the reader with a complex and scholarly study of how attitudes and stereotypes of the Black character developed in popular culture during the early period of the Victorian era.

This book is a painstaking - and at times irritating due to the constant need to refer to the notes at the back, only to find that things are no clearer - examination of how the Black ‘character’ and hence the popular Black persona developed and changed in theatre from the 17th century through to the 19th century and the abolition of slavery. We see hard-done-by characters sentimentalised by their white saviours and supporters change into deceitful, evil avengers, who in turn become a grotesque and comic underclass, drawn in this light to make the inhumanity and degradation they undergo more acceptable to the slavers and colonists and the wider society which benefitted from such inequality.

To go into much more detail - the book studies over 70 plays - would include the danger of becoming as lengthy and complicated as the book itself. If you are looking to sit down for a few hours in a comfortable chair in front of the fire and with a mug of cocoa, this wouldn’t be the right choice of reading material. But if you want detailed information on attitude towards and representation of Black characters and skin colour in the late 19th century and how this was arrived at, this is an ideal companion either for lengthy study, or quick dips when you come over all academical.

Reviewed by P. Max Alder

POSING BEAUTY: AFRICAN AMERICAN IMAGES FROM THE 1890S TO THE PRESENT by Deborah Willis

ISBN-10: 0393066967 & ISBN-13: 978-0393066968
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co. (22 Sep 2009) RRP £30-00

I fist meet Deborah Willis when she spoke at a London conference - I think it was for Iniva. What attracted me to her was not just her knowledge but also her sassy determination and total belief in we, her people.

There have been a few publications looking at the beauty of Black people but they seem to have concentrated on the glossy magazine image comparison.

Deborah tells that Posing Beauty is the result of ten years’ research, and the moment you open the book this is clearly the truth of the matter.
This book is not simply a Black versus white comparison of what is the definition of beauty. We have all seen those horrific ethnographical drawings of our ancestors with exaggerated protruding lips and flattened noses.

Willis takes the viewer on a journey through time, captured by camera, that tells our story in economics, style, music, war and civic struggle.

Do not expect a series of shots of models and film stars. They are here but they are not in the majority. Instead Wills considers what she calls “visual expression of power.” I believe she means by this that we each have the power to see the beauty within ourselves - a beauty that exceeds the perfect pert breast, bulging biceps, aquiline nose and so forth.

One image that I wish I could reproduce here is Eve Arnold’s Integration Crisis, which shows two young women touching up their makeup in a Ladies’ toilet. The longhaired blonde girl next to black girl with short haired: they are going to their first integrated dance.

In opposition to the brutal derogation, images of Black folk captured by camera (the “Old Black Joe” pictures) were equally derogarative in dehumanising the Black male into a photogenically castrated humbling old fella. Wills has located, via the work of her research team, post-civic rights images of Black men that make the viewer smile with a pride of ancestry; James Brown, Jim Brown, Stokey Carmichael and Tuskegee Airmen.

There are ordinary locations from the barber’s shop to the beach, the hairdressers to the sidewalks of America.

This book will look comfortable sitting on the coffee table of your home. The only problem is that I guarantee that all your visitors will forgo any conversation with you whilst they turn the pages, because we all need to see our own beauty reflected and Wallis has given us a fascinating mirror to view.

Reviewed by SuAndi

RRP: £7.99 Publisher: Legend Press Ltd ISBN: 9781906558246

I truly believe that this book has been waiting to spring forth for a very long time before fate stepped in; it was the placing of the then Senator Obama in Bonnie Greer’s home town of Chicago that allowed it to be born.

I know America; I know it beyond the limitations of Lower Manhattan and the chaos of Disneyworld. Yet, still I struggled to visualise the numerous location references of Chicago, a city that has yet to invite me to perform. A city I am desperate to visit and now even more so, as Greer weaves a wonderful tale. A musical history of what is the pulse of Chicago South Side.

Like Greer, I began to hear (of) Obama before I actually listened to him and long before I saw him. When I did see him, I was disappointed. His name made me expect a flowing dashiki at the very least. My eyes found a rather unsharp tall man, whom Greer perfectly sums up as failing to be “regular”.

If I did not know Greer personally rather than just as a TV personality, I might well assume she was a woman of many years - close to an Old Grandma, because the book has the feel of an oral history. It reads as though it was talked through recorded and transcribed just as spoken.  As a rambler myself, I travel ten blocks before I return to the street I was intending to tell my tale about. Greer does much the same, but sadly this means that often Obama is secondary in her oracle. Nevertheless this is what makes this a great book, and a frustrating one at the same time. I want to interrupt to ask a question to get a little more detail on a street, the curve of a highway, a note of music, even the smell of a neighbourhood.

The election of the 44th President of the United States, the election of a Black man to the White House is something none of us expected within our lifetime. Thousands of books deserve to be dedicated to such a historical event. Greer’s book could have stood alone without Obama, because it records  as she herself writes: “They  had left out entire swathes of the human story and we (Greer and all of us)  set out to correct it as we saw it.” (Pg 64)

Often we in the UK feel that we have lived our lives in the shadows of Black America: it is not true - there are as many similarities as differences. We simply need to know our respective stories better. Take this opportunity. Do not buy Greer and place her on the bookshelf - take some time out to listen to a history that plays mellow chords of social knowledge and observation.

Reviewed by SuAndi