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Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins by Mohammed Mrabet. Santa Barbara. 1976. Black Sparrow Press. Taped and Translated from the Moghrebi by Paul Bowles. 105 pages. 0876852746.

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   During his childhood Mrabet listened to traditional story tellers in Tangier´s cafés - a world that fascinated him. Later on he would invent his own stories, and Paul Bowles taped and transcribed his stories. Mrabet´s first novel Love with a Few Hairs was published 1967 in London by Peter Owen, followed two years later with The Lemon. Since then, seventeen books written by Mohammed Mrabet have been published and his works have been translated into twelve languages. Henry Miller wrote: ‘Mrabet sees what it means to work simply and tellingly. His writing is quite unique and an inspiration not only to young writers but to veterans too. He has found the secret of communicating on all levels.’ The language of Mrabet is a maze like the thousand alleys of the Medina - seductive, but dangerous - without a guide one is lost in suggestions and allusions. His culture does not lend itself to our limited rational thought - the only way is by feeling into it, not thinking.

Mohammed Mrabet (real name Mohammed ben Chaib el Hajjem), born on March 8, 1936, is a Moroccan author artist and storyteller of Berber heritage from the Beni Ouraaghil tribe in the Rifian Mountains. Mrabet is mostly known in the West through his association with Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams. Mrabet is an artist of intricate, yet colorful, felt tip and ink drawings in the style of Paul Masson or a more depressive, horror-show Jean Miro, which have been shown at various galleries in Europe and America. Mrabet's art work is his own: very loud and intricate, yet comparable with that of his contemporary, Jillali Gharbaoui (1930-1971). Mrabet is increasingly being recognized as an important member of a small group of Moroccan Master Painters who emerged in the immediate post Colonial period and his works have become highly sought after, mostly by European collectors. 

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Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius In Bondage by Vincent Carretta. Athens. 2011. University Of Georgia Press. 279 pages. hardcover. 9780820333380. Jacket image: Mindy Basinger Hill. Jacket illustration: Engraving of Phillis Wheatley, Scipio Moorhead.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   With POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman - of any race or background - to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley’s work was an international sensation. In PHILLIS WHEATLEY, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status. A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley’s origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley’s entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography. Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later.

Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including scholarly editions of the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano. His most recent books are EQUIANO, THE AFRICAN: BIOGRAPHY OF A SELF-MADE MAN, winner of the Annibel Jenkins Prize, and THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF PHILIP QUAQUE, THE FIRST AFRICAN ANGLICAN MISSIONARY, coedited with Ty M. Reese.

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Ousmane Sembene: the Making of a Militant Artist by Samba Gadjigo. Bloomington. 2010. Indiana University Press. 189 pages. paperback. Cover photos: front, courtesy of Thomas Jacob and back (top), courtesy of Ousmane Sembene: back (bottom). Translated by Moustapha Diop. Foreword by Danny Glover. 9780253221513.

FROM THE PUBLISHER –

   Samba Gadjigo presents a unique personal portrait and intellectual history of novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Though Sembène has persistently deflected attention away from his personality, his life, and his past, Gadjigo has had unprecedented access to the artist and his family. This book is the first comprehensive biography of Sembène and contributes a critical appraisal of his life and art in the context of the political and social influences on his work. Beginning with Sembènes life in Casamance, Senegal, and ending with his militant career as a dockworker in Marseilles, Gadjigo places Sembéne into the context of African colonial and postcolonial culture and charts his achievements in film and literature. This landmark book reveals the inner workings of one of Africa’s most distinguished and controversial figures.

Samba Gadjigo is Professor of French at Mount Holyoke College.

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The Republic Of Dreams by Nelida Pinon. New York. 1989. Knopf. 663 pages. July 1989. hardcover. 0394555252. Jacket illustration by Steven Rydberg. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Lane. (original title: Republica dos sonhos, 1984 - Livraria Francisco Alves Editora S/A, Rio de Janeiro).

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   This huge, mesmeric novel marks the debut in English of one of the most brilliant and admired of today’s Latin American writers. It is a novel that brings before the reader four generations of a family torn between its Spanish past and its Brazilian present. It is a revelation of the complexities and astonishments not only of family life but of Brazil itself - a revelation also of the power of storytelling and the nature of dreaming. As the novel opens, the matriarch Eulália has begun her final task - the task of dying. Long, long ago, when she first came to Brazil from Spain, a young bride with her young and already formidable, iron-willed husband, Madruga, they brought with them the passion, inspired by Grandfather Xan, for making memories into tales -tales told as sustenance, proof, and hallmark, tales told as protection against the killing rush of time. Now, as both Eulália and her era near their end, that tradition achieves its most poignant flowering-in a burst of family lore, recrimination, and recollected dreams, as the clan, gathered at Eulália’s side, relives the past and vies for the future. Madruga - founder of the family in Brazil - is the central figure not only of his own stories but of almost everyone else’s, as he is of their lives. His reminiscences have the sweep and drama of history. His authority and - equally despotic - his love have shaped the lives of all his five children. His granddaughter Breta, whom he has chosen as heir to his greatest treasure-his memory-sees the family as ‘stubbornly programming the life of its members’ so as to justify Madruga’s desertion, decades before, of their ancestral Spain. His fellow émigré Venâncio-the historian, the dreamer (in counterpoint to Madruga’s colonizer- industrialist)-feels unfit to live in the reality forged by men like his old friend. Through the recollections- unfolding in layers, moving backward and forward across the century - of Madruga and those connected to him by blood or circumstances, a stunning dynastic drama is played out. At the same time, Nélida Piñon’s magnificent novel invites us to experience each of its two realms - the new world of Brazil, infatuated with what is to come while longing for what is lost, and the interior world of fantasy, remembrance, and emotion in which we all live - as a republic of dreams.

Nélida Piñon (born May 3, 1937) is a Brazilian writer. Born in Rio de Janeiro of Galician immigrants. Her first novel was Guia-Mapa de Gabriel Arcanjo (The Guidebook of Archangel Gabriel), written in 1961, it concerns a protagonist discussing Christian doctrine with her guardian angel. In the 1970s she became noted for erotic novels A casa de paixão (The House of Passion) and A força do destino (The Force of Destiny), written in 1977. In 1984 she perhaps had her greatest success with A Republica dos Sonhos, English translation The Republic of Dreams. The work involves generations of a family from Galicia who emigrated to Brazil. This relates to her own family's experience. She is a former President of Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters).

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How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America by Manning Marable. Boston. 1983. 344 pages. paperback. 0896081656. Cover design by Kathy Moore. 

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   This is Manning Marable’s most important work. Written in the tradition of Walter Rodney’s HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, and drawing on a wealth of recent economic data, this book systematically examines how all segments of the Black community have been exploited by the dual structures of racism and capitalism. Marable also explores the role of patriarchy in affecting Black women and the Black community as a whole. In successive chapters, Marable charts the development of the Black working class, the Black poor, Black women and Black prisoners. Turning to the Black elite, Marable explains the contradictory role of Black petty entrepreneurs, politicians, ministers and educators within the racist/capitalist state. The author concludes with an eloquent analysis of the violence and racist reaction currently unleashed against Blacks, and articulates a socialist vision and strategy essential to overcome the patterns of underdevelopment. HOW CAPITALISM UNDERDEVELOPED BLACK AMERICA is one of the most crucial studies of race and class written in the last decade.

Manning Marable was M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. He was founding director of African American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003. Since 2002, he has directed Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History. The author of fifteen books, Marable was also the editor of the quarterly journal Souls. Manning Marable died in April 2011.

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Trumbull Park by Frank London Brown. Boston. 2005. Northeastern University Press. paperback. 432 pages. Cover illustration by Leslie Evans. Foreword by Mary Helen Washington. Northeastern Library of Black Literature. Series editor: Richard Yarborough. 1455553628x.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Frank London Brown’s powerful debut novel, originally published in 1959. fictionalizes the real-life ordeals of the first black families to integrate Chicago’s Trumbull Park public housing project in the 1950s. Protagonist Buggy Martin tells the first-person story of moving with his wife and two children from a rotting tenement on the South Side to the new development, where the family is besieged by angry whites. They endure the strain of living with racial violence - until the day Buggy and a friend refuse police protection and walk home together through the white mob. ‘Brown has probed the psychology of people under fire. The real drama in this novel is not found in what white people tried to do to their Negro neighbors: it comes from tile self-restraining heroism in the Negroes.’ – R. L. Duffus, New York Times Book Review. ‘How in the end, determination and decency seem about to triumph, is the theme of this story, unfolded in terms of characters terribly alive and real.’ – Langston Hughes, New York Herlad Tribune Book Review. ‘[This story] will shame white Americans. but it is not grimly accusatory. That is one of Brown’s great achievements, that hatred did not guide his pen.’ – Alan Paton, Chicago Sunday Tribune. 

FRANK LONDON BROWN (1927-1962) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and his family moved to Chicago when he was twelve. An associate editor of Ebony, he also wrote THE MYTH MAKER, a novel, as well as numerous articles and short stories published in Down Beat, Negro Digest, Chicago Review, Ebony, and Southwest Review. Brown also worked as a machinist, bartender, loan interviewer, postal clerk, union organizer, and jazz singer, and he was the first writer to read his short stories to jazz accompaniment.

MARY HELEN WASHINGTON is Professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the editor of INVENTED LIVES: NARRATIVES OF BLACK WOMEN, 1860-1960 and MEMORY OF KIN: STORIES ABOUT FAMILY BY BLACK WRITERS.

RICHARD YARBOROUGH, editor of the Northeastern library of Black Literature, is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Blues Legacies & Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, & Billie Holliday by Angela Y. Davis. New York. 1998. Pantheon Books. 427 pages. February 1998. hardcover. 067945005x. Jacket photographs: (top) Billie Holliday by Bob Willoughby/Redferns/Retna; (bottom left) Ma rainey and (bottom right) Bessie Smith/Frank Diggs Collection/Archive Photos. Jacket design by Chin-Yee Lai.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   In BLUES LEGACIES AND BLACK FEMINISM, one of our most important intellectuals and political activists brilliantly reinterprets and celebrates the tradition of black women blues singers. Jazz, it is widely accepted, is the signal original American contribution to world culture. Angela Davis shows us how the roots of that form in the blues must be viewed not only as a musical tradition but as a life-sustaining vehicle for an alternative black working-class collective memory and social consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American middle-class values. And she explains how the tradition of black women blues singers - represented by Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday - embodies not only an artistic triumph and aesthetic dominance over a hostile popular music industry but an unacknowledged proto-feminist consciousness within working-class black communities. Through a close and riveting analysis of these artists’ performances, words, and lives, Davis uncovers the unmistakable assertion and uncompromising celebration of non-middle-class, non-heterosexual social, moral, and sexual values. Davis’s passionate, revelatory, and beautifully nuanced arguments are  confirmed in her careful transcription of all the extant lyrics recorded by Rainey and Smith. These are published here in their entirety for the first time. The cumulative impact of these lyrics, read within the illuminating frame that Davis provides, has the force of great art and restores to the present an indispensable and transformative critical American aesthetic. 

ANGELA DAVIS is the editor of IF THEY COME IN THE MORNING: VOICES OF RESISTANCE and the author of ANGELA DAVIS: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY; WOMEN, RACE, AND CLASS, and WOMEN, CULTURE, AND POLITICS. She is Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Home To Harlem by Claude McKay. Boston. 1987. Northeastern University Press. paperback. 340 pages. Cover design by Ann Twombly. Cover illustration by Michael McCurdy. Foreword by Wayne F. Cooper. 1555530249.

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   First published in 1928 and long out of print, this classic novel gives voice to the alienation and frustration of urban blacks during an era when Harlem was in vogue. With sensual, often brutal accuracy, Claude McKay traces the parallel paths of two very different young men struggling to find their way through the suspicion and prejudice of American society in the early twentieth century. At the same time, this stark but moving story touches on the central themes of the Harlem Renaissance, including the urgent need for unity and identity among ordinary blacks - for a common thread even though ‘we ain’t nonetall the same.’ ‘A notable contribution, this, to American literature.’ - Chicago Daily Tribune. ‘Here is realism, stark, awful but somehow beautiful. McKay has left no stone unturned, no detail unmentioned in this telling of things as they are.’ - New York Herald Tribune. ‘Home to Harlem is a book to invoke pity and terror.’ – Bookman. 

Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.

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The Good Fight by Shirley Chisholm. New York. 1973. Harper & Row. hardcover. 206 pages.  A Moving & Hard-Hitting Statement by The First Woman & First African American To Run For President In 1968. 0060107642.

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   What is it like to be the first black as well as the first woman to run for President? With the striking candor and straightforward style for which she is famous, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm tells the story of her unique campaign of 1972. But THE GOOD FIGHT is more than the story of a battle waged with virtually no funds, no professional organization and with outspoken or oblique opposition from members of her own party and race. It is also the story of her continuing struggle for the reform of American politics. In blunt language she describes how politicians operate, from the wheeling and dealing that accompanied the primaries to the final dramatic maneuvering at the 1972 Democratic national convention. She writes of her relationships with black political leaders Walter Fauntroy, Louis Stokes, Ron Dellums, and Julian Bond, of the innate conservatism and piety she regards as characteristic of the black majority and what this meant in terms of her candidacy, and what direction she feels black politics should take in the years to come. Deeply committed to the cause of equal justice for blacks and for women, she refused to become the captive of either faction, a position that precipitated a bitter power struggle between members of both groups. Scrupulously honest about the errors in her own campaign, she does not hesitate to criticize George McGovern for the arrogance of his campaign staff and its failure to make contact with minority groups, women, labor, older voters, and non-college young people. Interlaced throughout the book are many lively and humorous anecdotes of her experiences on the ‘campaign trail’— including a particularly memorable account of her hospital visit with George Wallace. A firm believer in coalition politics, she offers some practical approaches for achieving this, as well as her own ideas on the future of the Democratic Party and her explicit opinions on the second-term Nixon. Shirley Chisholm sees her campaign as an extension of her role in politics as an idealist without illusions and as a potential voice for all the out-groups and minorities. This book bears the stamp of her remarkable personality; in it she tells the truth as she sees it regardless of its effect on her political future. 

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (November 30, 1924 – January 1, 2005) was an American politician, educator, and author. She was a Congresswoman, representing New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1968, she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (Margaret Chase Smith had previously run for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination). She received 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

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Unbought & Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm. Boston. 1970. Houghton Mifflin. hardcover. 177 pages. October 1970.  Jacket photographs by Gordon Parks. Jr.  0395683680.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman to be elected to the Congress of the United States. She won this unique designation the hard way — against the odds of her race and sex, and against all the ground rules of the political game. This is Mrs. Chisholm’s own story of how she got there and how she assesses her role as a black woman in politics. Her story begins with a sharply perceived self-portrait of growing up in Brooklyn where her Barbadian parents, long on discipline but strong on love, survived the depths of depression poverty to give their children college educations. It was during these formative years that her nascent racial awareness gathered into a resolve to do something concrete for the black community. Her career in politics started In the early 1950s at the lowest rung on the political ladder, in Brooklyn’s boss-run Democratic clubhouses. Persistently challenging the inequities of the machine, she came to be regarded as a troublemaking maverick — but one to be reckoned with. Her rise from local clubhouse worker to New York State Assemblywoman in Albany on to representative in the U.S. Congress was accomplished by the will of a dynamic, fighting woman with an unswerving belief in her own purpose: to put the needs of her people before political expediency. ‘Unbought and Unbossed’ was Mrs. Chisholms street-corner campaign slogan when she won the election away from the odds-on favorite, former CORE director James Farmer. Since her fiery, precedent-breaking first months in Congress, she has continued to work under this system-bucking banner. Congresswoman Chisholm speaks out and she speaks straight — on a Congress bogged down by ‘the senility system.’ the Nixon administration’s failure to grapple with the priority problems of poverty. She expresses her hopes for the women’s liberation movement and the younger generation in rightful rebellion. She tells how she has managed to combine a political life with a happy marriage. She explains her relations with the militant blacks and her reasons for choosing to work within the political system. With singular fervor and understanding, she has shaped her life and convictions in an attempt to bridge the gaps of generation, sex, and race. Her story has immediate relevance for all Americans. 

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (November 30, 1924 – January 1, 2005) was an American politician, educator, and author. She was a Congresswoman, representing New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1968, she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (Margaret Chase Smith had previously run for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination). She received 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.