B'rang

Lester Holt's Maternal Roots

(From Lester Holt, TODAY Anchor)
Why is it that sometimes the farther you are from the past the more you are drawn toward it? As a child I never talked much to my maternal grandparents about their lives growing up, where they came from, or how they came to immigrate to America. I knew of course they were both born in Jamaica, and were married and had my mom after they had moved to New York. My grandfather passed away when I was just 8. My grandmother lived well into her 90's. 

I ate a lot of Jamaican foods and was exposed to some of the culture and customs growing up, but never felt a pull to explore that part of my background until two years ago when my mother, June, made her first trip to Jamaica. The stories and pictures she brought back of ancestors, relatives and pieces of family history she didn't know existed were inspiring. Listening to her delight in the stories of her trip also made me regret I had never had those conversations with my grandparents.

And so when TODAY producers asked me to do "something special" with my mother for a Mother's Day weekend story, I knew just what I wanted to do: To "go home" to Jamaica with my mom.  To see through her eyes the Jamaica of her parents.

It was a rich journey of discovery for both us, as we visited the 173-year-old church some of our ancestors built, and walked across the plantation my triple-great grandfather owned, even finding his grave in a tiny tree-sheltered cemetery. As we drove through Spanishtown my mother pointed out the river that my grandfather described learning to swim in the day his brothers unceremoniously tossed him in.  But without a doubt the most poignant and emotional moment for both of us was the discovery of the house my grandmother and her seven siblings were raised in.  We didn't know it still existed, but it was just as she had described it to my mom.  Standing there taking in the house and the land I could suddenly see my grandmother in this place. And with my mother at my side I could also now clearly see my connection to Jamaica. WATCH VIDEO

Ms. Rosa Guy

Guy, Rosa (b. 1925), internationally acclaimed writer of adult and young people's fiction centering on the African diaspora and cofounder of the Harlem Writers Guild. Rosa Cuthbert Guy is of dual heritage—born in Trinidad, she grew up in Harlem, where events in her own life shaped her creative outlook, forming her unforgettable themes and characters. Rosa and her sister Ameze were left with relatives when their parents Audrey and Henry Cuthbert emigrated to the United States in 1927. The girls joined their parents in 1932, and briefly the family was united; however, in 1933, Rosa's mother became ill and the children were sent to Brooklyn to live with a cousin. The cousin was a Garveyite whose politics of black nationalism profoundly affected young Rosa. In 1934, Rosa's mother died and she and her sister returned to Harlem to live with their father who remarried. The girls lived briefly with a stepmother until 1937, when their father died.

Poised on the threshold of adolescence, then orphaned in New York, Guy's experiences breathe life into her works for young people. Guy's maturation process, made difficult by her outsider status in the African American community because she was West Indian, produced a vision that scrutinized both worlds. Following their father's death, Rosa and her sister lived in an orphanage. At age fourteen, Guy left school to work in a brassiere factory in the garment district.

In 1941, Rosa met and married Warner Guy. She was sixteen. While her husband served in World War II, Guy continued to work in the factory but sought creative ways to express herself. A coworker introduced Guy to the American Negro Theater (ANT). ANT, established in 1940, proved a launching pad for such actors as Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. Guy did not perform in any of the theater productions but studied acting there. In 1942, she gave birth to Warner, her only child.

When the war ended, Guy moved with her husband and son to Connecticut. Five years later her marriage dissolved and she returned to New York and resumed her factory job. Again she sought the artistic community, but the thriving theater group had vanished. Another organization, the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, had replaced it. The committee's purpose was to eliminate racial stereotypes in the arts. Interaction with this group resulted in Guy writing and performing in her first play, Venetian Blinds (1954), a successful one-act play produced Off-Broadway at the Tropical Theater.

The committee enabled Guy to meet many artists, some of them writers, including John O. Killens. Killens and she shared similar aims, wanting to project an authentic black voice in their works. Guy's artistic orientation predates the Black Arts Movement and probably owes a debt to the Garvey movement. In 1951, Guy and Killens formed a workshop that became the Harlem Writers Guild. With such participants as Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Douglas Turner Ward, and Maya Angelou, the workshop achieved fame long before Guy ever published her first work. Between 1951 and 1970, more than half of all successful African American writers were associated with the workshop.

The workshop and Killens provided the encouragement Guy needed to perfect her craft. In spite of her limited schooling, working, and single-parenting, Guy had no choice but to write. Although she never directly said so, her works seem to indicate that she was, in fact, writing to save her life—or more specifically, writing herself into being. She states that writing “was a driving force in that orphan, out there on the streets … who needed something through which to express herself, through which to become a full-bodied person” (Jerrie Norris, Presenting Rosa Guy, 1988).

Guy's first published works consist of two short stories of which there are no surviving copies. ““The Carnival”,” reflecting her West Indian heritage, and another her New York experience, were published in a Trinidadian newspaper by C. L. R. James, who in 1960 was editor. Bird at My Window (1966), Guy's first novel, received mixed reviews. J. Saunders Redding's now famous remark was the most negative criticism, claiming that “preoccupation with repossessing a heritage had led to distortion of values and reality … making heroes out of heels” (Crisis, Apr. 1966). Guy's protagonist, Wade Williams, like her former husband who was murdered, was destroyed by poverty and racism. She dedicated the novel to Malcolm X, calling him “pure gold salvaged from the gutter of the ghettos.”

The assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., prompted Guy to embrace another genre. She wanted to know how violence affected young people and traveled South for the first time in her life to interview her subjects. Children of Longing (1970), a collection of essays, resulted from her investigations. However, the work upon which Guy's reputation as a writer is based is her trilogy for young adults: The Friends (1973); Ruby (1976); and Edith Jackson (1978). The trilogy gives new meaning to the bildungsroman tradition, including race, gender, culture, and class previously missing from this genre.

Guy's other books include The Disappearance (1979), the first in a series about young detective Imamu Jones; Mirror of Her Own (1981), which focuses on white characters and received mixed reviews; Mother Crocodile (1981), an adaptation of an African fable for younger readers; New Guys Around the Block (1983), the second Imamu Jones book; A Measure of Time (1983), an adult novel that reached number one on the best-seller list in England; Paris, Peewee, and Big Dog (1984), another highly praised novel; My Love, My Love, or The Peasant Girl (1985), a novel based on ““Little Mermaid””; And I Heard a Bird Sing (1987), the third in the Imamu Jones trilogy; The Ups and Downs of Carl Davis III (1989); Billy the Great Child (1991); The Music of Summer (1992); and Caribbean Carnival: Songs of the West Indies (1992), a collection of songs for children; and The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of the Wind (1995).

Guy's approach to her audience, adults as well as young readers, is sincere and honest. She says “a novel … is an emotional history of a people in time and place” (““Young Adult Books”,” Horn Book Magazine, 1985). Her works expose her own emotional history as the young West Indian woman, dislocated and marginalized, often longing for love and acceptance. We see also Guy's understanding of the African American urban experience. Utilizing her particular emotional history, loneliness, and pain she speaks to readers over chasms of generations and cultures about the experiences of life.

 http://www.answers.com/topic/rosa-guy

Drum Play Workshop - Bangarang 2010

A feedback on Bangarang

Dear Ms. Maxine Alexander,
I want to thank you for your invitation to attend the event, on Saturday September 25, 2k10, @ Medgar Evers College Campus, Brooklyn NY. It was an experience that I never envision or expected. The portion of the event that I attended, gave me a greater appreciation for the Drums and its purpose, to our spirituality and cultural heritage.

The material presented by the panel of speakers were extraordinary to some one like me.  It was full of purpose, with great spiritual knowledge and cultural understanding of the Drums. You did a Great Job putting the program together and bringing it to the community. Take care and be bless, until our next correspondence.


Best Regards,
Hon. David Forde
President, CEO/Founder of the International Society of United Caribbean Nationals, USA, Org. (ISUCAN)

High-energy Pre-party

 J'Ouvert is high-energy pre-party for West Indian American Day Carnival Parade... read more
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/09/05/2010-09-05

BANGARANG!

Talk about neglect.. this blog is patient. If I was left on pause like this I'd walk away. Lot of fires, learning to put them out one at a time.

I am up and ready to "wake the town and tell the people" Bangarang is almost here.
Listen... Do you hear it?
Can you feel it?
Can you see it?

Join us ...9/25/2010 Medgar Evers College Campus, Brooklyn, New York starting at 2 PM.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=268792986805

Adlib to Brooklyn Caribbean Heritage Festival

The event Brooklyn Caribbean Youth Fest (BCYF) will adlib and become Brooklyn Caribbean Heritage Festival (BCHF). Introduction of this event in 2005, allowed me to carve out a space between the familiar and not so familiar components within Caribbean folk art and traditions.  I make this transition due to an overwhelming response from the local performing arts community. This interest is helping my team and I increase awareness and sustain Caribbean art forms.

The early days of another Caribbean event kept me focused on the primary goals and overall purpose of the festival. Extremely fundamental to the thrust are, the event deeply embrace grass-root traditions telling Caribbean stories well, it invites and welcomes expressions and jargons that are passed down via oral tradition and it is a compilation of the Caribbean's ethnic diversity. 

I am very excited and pleased that as BCYF the event cultivated public interest. Upwards of 5,000+ New Yorkers attend the festival and have been entertained by professional and emerging artists. Getting non-mainstream events infront of audience particularly youth and family as one unit, is my main focus. As such the mission is simple... showcase and preserve Caribbean culture.

2010 transition and feature is a milestone that brings Broadway efficiency. As we embark upon the first thematic program, spotlighting Kumina as an example of Caribbean drumming  culture and ritual art, my cup runneth over. I envision Bangarang: Drum Beats of the Caribbean, a powerful center piece that will present historical and social context, immersion, growth and maintenance of Caribbean Americans cultural legacy.   

Happy New Year

Greetings and Happy New year

@HNY my team and I have embarked on rich folklore compilations to send your way in 2010. The main presentations are Collage (June) and Bangarang (Sat., September 25th). Created with heart and soul, both will celebrate Caribbean NYC. These richly interpretable  features are programed to stimulate and reward our brain- for all art junkies

In collaboration with the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center@Brooklyn Public Library, Collage is an exhibit comprising mainly photography and paintings. It catalogues NYC Caribbean Community’s infinite profundity. As a translucent explication and absorption  of the natural elements within these enclaves, the showing will convey subtle but an authentic sense of a community’s life force. Collage opens June, spotlighting the contributions of Dr. Una  S. T. Clarke; Mr. Kenton Kirby and Dr. Marco Mason.

For the annual Brooklyn Caribbean Heritage Fest, I’ve signed the prolific drummer Gabu Wedderburn for Bangarang, and Kumina, has been selected as the defacto “Star’”. Gabu will spearhead this ritual arts event complete with workshop, demo and exhibition. He will also perform at the Twilight  Concert backed-up by a carefully selected Bandu Cyas that simultaneously combines hand drumming, dancers with riveting motions and songs delivered in smooth tones. Additionally, Banagarang will feature the earthy, sacred rapture sounds of Ra-ra (Haiti), Shango (Trinidad & Grenada) and the festive Tassa.

Bangarang honors the oldest and most recognized musical instrument in the world. Workshops and daylight activities are FREE. Tickets for the Twilight Concert will go on sale in June, ticket agents will be announced.  We will also have tickets available on the day of the show, however don’t count on this...... our venue has limited space.

As we continue to celebrate Caribbean culture by telling good old Caribbean stories with sounds and movement I thank you for your support. Please stay tuned for announcements.