Monday, September 16, 2013
Friday, September 13, 2013
Dr. Jerry Ward on Edwidge Danticat
[By Jerry W. Ward, Jr]
It is hard to classify Edwidge Danticat,
to map where her imagination is located between the future and the past. She writes well. This adverbial compliment identifies her as a
successful rebel. She satisfies the demands of commerce and undermines those demands
in her critiques of banality.
Is she an American writer?
Yes. She writes in and about the
Americas.
Is she a Haitian writer?
Yes.
She knows the anatomy of the womb wherein the primal horror of her
native land gestated. Aimé Césaire”s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal enjoys
conversations with her works.
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Alice Walker, Autobiographical Contract, and Sciences of Memory
[By Jerry Ward, Jr.]
Definition is essential. What does womanist mean and what is its
relation to feminist? Does the assertion
that womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender explain saturation as a
major difference in historical experience?
The various essays, bits of interviews, poetry (inside prose frames) and
reviews collected in Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983)
suggest an answer. They suggest that Walker the novelist is of a
“revolutionary” mind like a furious flower, is as serious as was Zora Neale
Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Toni Cade Bambara. These women assumed the freedom to
create is an entitlement of nature not of man. And they have the backing of
words attributed to Sojourner Truth in 1851: “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do
wid Him.”
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
A Letter to Kalamu Ya Salaam
[By Jerry Ward, Jr.]
Note: For essential
life history information about ya
Salaam, read “Kalamu ya Salaam 1947-/Art for Life: My Story, My Song” in
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 21, pages 179-252. The letter
is my response to the typescript of THE SOUND (ING) OF BLACK POETRY: A Study
Guide To The Theory and History of Black Poetry.
Jerry
W. Ward, Jr.
1872
Lincolnshire Blvd.
Ridgeland,
Mississippi 39157-1213
September 3, 1995
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