Migrations of the Heart - An Autobiography

Zusatztext "It is a book all women will find useful and compelling and all men who love women will find disturbing! painful! and instructive." --Alice Walker "Golden's book reads like a lyrical and well-balanced novel! but it is all the more difficult to put down because the story is true." – Newsday “The book is exquisitely written.” — Los Angeles Times "A marvelous journey . . . powerful imagery. . . . Distinctly drawn characters come alive! events pulsate with energy."-- The Washington Post Book World Informationen zum Autor Marita Golden has written both fiction and nonfiction, including Migrations of the Heart , The Edge of Heaven , A Miracle Every Day , and Saving Our Sons . She is the editor of Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues: Black Women Writers on Love, Men and Sex and the coeditor of Gumbo: An Anthology of African American Writing and of Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race . She is the founder and CEO of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, which supports African American writers, and lives in Maryland. Please visit Marita at www.maritagolden.com. Klappentext In her classic memoir, distinguished author, television executive, and activist Marita Golden beautifully recounts an astounding journey to Africa and back. Marita Golden was raised in Washington, D.C., by a mother who was a cleaning woman and a father who was taxi-driver. For all their struggles, with life and each other, her parents instilled her with spirit and aspirations. Swept up in the heady Black Power movement of the sixties, Marita moved to New York to study journalism at Columbia--and fell in love with Femi Ajayi, a Nigerian architecture student.. Their passion led them to start a life together in Africa--a place Marita was eager to understand. Exhilarated by a world free of white racism, Marita quickly found work as a professor and embraced motherhood. But Femi's increasing expectations that she snap into the role of the submissive Nigerian wife were shocking and dispiriting. Her struggle to regain her footing and shape a black identity that was true to her spirit is suspenseful and inspiring, an uncommon tale of race, identity, and Africa. 1 My father was the first man I ever loved. He was as assured as a panther. His ebony skin was soft as the surface of coal. The vigorous scent of El Producto cigars was a perfume that clung to him. The worn leather seat of his taxi, a stubborn aroma, had seeped into his pores, and like a baptism the smells rubbed onto me from the palms of his hands. In school he went as far as the sixth grade, then learned the rest on his own. Part of the rest he bequeathed to me--gold nuggets of fact, myth, legend dropped in the lap of my mind, shiny new pennies meant to be saved. By his own definition he was "a black man and proud of it." Arming me with a measure of this conviction, he unfolded a richly colored tapestry, savored its silken texture and warned me never to forget its worth. Africa:"It wasn't dark until the white man got there." Cleopatra: "I don't care WHAT they tell you in school, she was a black woman." Hannibal: "He crossed the Alps with an army of five hundred elephants." The Sphinx (pointing with a tobacco-stained index finger to a page in the encyclopedia): "Look at the nose, see how broad it is? That's your nose. That's my nose too." Bitter, frightening tales of slavery dredged by his great-grandparents from memories that refused to be mute. Passed to him. Passed to me. And when he recounted the exploits of Toussaint L'Ouverture, pausing to remind me that L'Ouverture meant "The Opener," inside his eyes I saw fire and smoke float over the hills of Haiti, and his voice stalked the room amid the clanging of swords, the stomp of heavy boots. Our most comfortable stage was his taxicab. On frigid winter Saturday afternoon...

Product details

• Authors: Marita Golden
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 04.01.2005
• EAN: 9781400078318
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7831-8
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 15 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries