TRAVELLING IN WEIGHTED CLOGS

black and (A)broad:

traveling beyond 

                                                                               the limitations of identity

“Child, who’s going to do your hair if you take off with this man to Holland?” challenged a voice inside my head not even a minute after my Dutch boyfriend of two years asked me to move back “home” with him. And rightly so because Holland wasn’t exactly known as the Mecca for black hair care. It wasn’t like when I’d moved to Washington, D.C. (a.k.a. Chocolate City), where I could get my hair done on every other street corner.”

The opening chapter of this memoir brought back memories, when I moved to the South of France many year ago, before TGMOBTE  (The Great Migration of Blacks to Europe).  I had moved to an area in South Eastern France, and feared that I might have to take a train to Marseille (three hours each way back then) or fly to Paris, just to “touch up my roots”.

What I found, though, was that French people can do almost anything, with panache style and creativity.  Even when meeting  up with the challenges of black hair.

But I digress…

Carolyn Vines was raised in the United States.  Her memoir  chronicles the journey of a black American women from the restrictive baggage filled with  American racial, class and cultural  attire to the challenges of  recognizing the opportunity that awaited her outside in the larger world as a unique member of the global community.

One only has to look at her family photo at the beginning of the book to see that the cute, bright inquisitive looking child in the center would have a destiny outside of a restricted cultural climate.

The catalyst of her journey was her Dutch boyfriend and future husband, whom she met in The United States and eventually moved with to Holland.

Her novel spans a twenty year roller coaster ride of living, travelling and working abroad.

Thank you, Carolyn, for your wonderful and inspiring memoir.  

Now, I look forward to your novel.

author Carolyn Vines

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

A MIDLIFE CRISIS ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA

Ladyfingers: a novel by Delorys Welch-Tyson

Review of Ladyfingers: A Novel

“Black folks on the French Riviera?  Get outta here!  The French Riviera is a location for F. Scott Fitzgerald characters, not Terry McMillan people,” most would probably think.

 Well, let me tell you,  us American colored folks have been living down there on the coast as well as in Paris. 

That’s how I got here myself. 

Yours truly was inspired to explore the South of France by one of my favourite American authors, James Baldwin.  Not only did he live in Paris, but he spent most of his adult life until his death in Saint Paul de Vence, on the French Riviera.  Then there was black American  entertainer Bobby Short.  There were the jazz impresarios, George and Joyce Wein, the founders of the Nice Jazz Festival who had secondary residences in Vence. Let’s not forget the fact that Josephine Baker spent her last years with her Rainbow Tribe in Roquebrunne, on the French Riviera.  Among many others who I won’t name out of respect for their privacy, I will add Miss Tina Turner, the author of Ladyfingers, Delorys Welch-Tyson as well as yours truly.

The author Delorys Welch-Tyson has taken characters usually associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald and paralleled their lives with characters you might find in a Terry McMillan novel to create hilarious midlife crisis tales of American women living on the French Riviera.

Basically, the story is that a famous American filmmaker (no…it isn’t Spike Lee) is planning a wedding banquet at the Negresco Hotel on the French Riviera.  A ban of East Somarians plan to kidnap the American guests in order to demand ransom for their Anti-Sanction Society rebel organization.  The kidnapping plan is foiled due to the lack of strategic planning and general confusion which seemed to prevail during the post 9/11 Bush Administration.

Then there's the internationally famous Pop Diva (hints of Diana Ross, maybe?) in love with both a sadistic Belgian Mime and a manipulative record mogul.  But that a whole 'nother  parallel story!

This novel is written as humour and political satire

 Is the story plausible? Yes.  Absolutely, yes!

authro, Delorys Welch Tyson

 Believable?  No.

A HO' IN ITALY: a book review

This tale is told as a back-story.

Mira and Nick , now divorced and remarried to other people, look back on the demise of their marriage.

Only a hot minute after the elaborate wedding of this golden, Ivy League couple, the wife allows herself to be picked up in the business class lounge of an airport.  You see, her husband left before her to take a job in Rome and she was to follow later.  

Well she did, and got detoured along the way, in the airport lounge, by a wizened,  aged, Italian billionaire, named Zenin.

Despite the glamorous scenes of the high life of Rome, Paris, Monte Carlo, Tel Aviv, London and Venice, it’s a pathetic tale of betrayal without the requisite love which generally accompanies it.  It’s a tale of  sterile materialism and moral bankruptcy.

Personally, I believe someone had slipped a Mickey on the golden couple back at the wedding.  The way I see it, the story makes no sense any other way.

On an even more cynical note: let me inform you that this is a triangular,  interracial romance story, with a black female protagonist, her cuckolded white husband and her detached and self-absorbed European toy manufacturer.

author Andrea lee

Lost Hearts is a most interesting novel taking place in the most appropriate setting for such a  dubious subject…Italy!

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TWO FRIENDS AND A TALE OF TWO COUNTRIES: a book review

BLACKGAMMON by Heather Neff

“Understand this, Michael : There’s no such thing as a sanctuary. “

Believe me when I say that the pessimistic opening line of this intriguing novel belies the apparent optimism of the writer’s vision.  At least this is what I concluded after reading this story which chronicles friendship of two women from two different generations whose destinies were to work, live and try to love in Europe.

Michael…that’s right her name is Michael…lives in the academic environment of England, as professor of…predictably…African American literature with her husband a brilliant English scholar of ….you guessed it…African literature.

Cloe Emmnauel is a….. painter.  Well, at least she not a Naomi Campbell clone or an  aspiring chocolate Hemmingway squandering her days away playing with the green fairy in the squalor of bohemian Paris.  I’ll get to those books later.

Nevertheless, the two women met by chance in an American museum.  The older woman, planning to flee to Paris after  a disastrous romance with an Black-Canadian immigrant (yes, you read that correctly) and the other a quasi-orphan with dreams of living abroad, meet, become fast friends and  vowed to keep in touch.

They kept their vow throughout the novel through letters and occasional visits involving heart wrenching revelations..

Cloë the painter struggles with domestic violence issues from her past while trying to negotiate some equilibrium between her increasingly successful and demanding career and her challengingly peculiar love life.  The cultural and ethnic dynamics of her personal relationships with the men in her life will  definitely baffle any female reader who has lived abroad for any length of time, yet despite the implausibility of her mates you will probably gladly follow the story to its conclusion because of the vivid images of the cosmopolitan lifestyle of these two friends.

Black American women living abroad will obviously react  to the relationship configurations of these two women with a certain degree of scepticism.  More than a touch of mendacity and hints of multi-cultural treason prevail in this tragic-comic novel of the search for identity, love and, professional success.

The problem I find with novels written about American women abroad is that there is a stereotypical quality to the life choices of these women.  It places limits on the perceptions of the black American experience abroad, which limits the kind of novels we can expect  to be disseminated through the mainstream publishing industry.

Despite what probably feels like a negative review of Blackgammon, I actually thoroughly enjoyed it on many levels.

author, Heather Neff

Next I will review, Andrea Lee’s LOST HEARTS IN ITALY

KIDNAPPED AND IN HOLLAND: a book review

LENOIR by Ken Greenhall

"THEY ARE DERANGED.

They are pale, their country is flat and wet, and they have no souls.  I believe they are being punished for having only one God."

This powerful opening paragraph hooked me until the very end.

Have you ever visited a museum and noticed the rare face of  a Black person amid the colors and nuances of a European culture?  When you stopped to reflect, did you ever think to push yourself into the time and place of the painting while wondering what life was like for the exotic individual who inspired it?

Dutch painter, Peter Paul Rubens painting, Four Heads of A Negro was the inspiration for author Ken Greenhall's  extraordinary novel, LENOIR.

Lenoir, a kidnapped African during the European slave trade, is sold to a Dutch hustler during the height of  the Renaissance in 17th century Amsterdam.

The regal and arrogant Lenoir, finds himself both intrigued and repulsed by the Dutch society in which he finds himself.  In his  complex status as a slave he finds his duties to include that of companion, business partner, advisor, clandestine lover, to a man who introducess him to the upper levels of  society and the great salons of  the artistic community.

Working as a artists' model and painter's assistant  for personages such as Rembrandt and Rubens, and eventually as an actor for the traveling Italian Commedia de Arte theatre troup allows Lenoir to become a keen social observer and participant in the strange customs of what he considered a souless,  primitive and morally conflicted people.

Lenoir is an astonishing ahcievement and a well crafted novel, by a contemporary author who obviously had spent a great many years as an outsider in Europe's Low Country.

Next review: Blackgammon by Heather Neff

Maxwell Dumaurier's Book Reviews

Let me Introduce myself.

Maxwell Dumaurier

Exhausted with the confusing and frustrating changes as an actress…a black female actress, I should emphasize…in the New York theater, I retired, a few years ago, with my husband, to a sleepy, seaside village a few kilometers from Marseille, in France.  It is here where I have begun my second career as ghost writer of books concerning cultural and environmental issues.

Having a luxury of time on my hand (as apposed to the break-neck, blood pressure-elevating pace of life in New York City)I have also begun to indulge again in my love of contemporary fiction.

What I began to notice after a time…a very short time, I might add…is a dearth of fiction and non-fiction about the black American presence in foreign countries.  It’s been a part of our history and heritage to explore alternative lifestyles away from North America ever since the first slave ships from Africa landed on the coasts of the “New World”

And why not?

Josephine Baker

Considering the bizarre and often reprehensible treatment of black American people that was deemed normal, moral and acceptable by most, it should be no surprise that ordinary and extraordinary people of brown color in the United States left to test their fates in other locales.  From notables like Shakespearean actor Ira 

Barbara Chase Ribaud

Aldridge in the 1800s to entertainer Josephine Baker, authors Barbara Chase Ribaud, and James Baldwin, restauranteur and actor Leroy Haynes, opera singer, Grace Bumbry, author Jake Lamar, politician Yvette Jarvis, author and painter, Delorys Welch Tyson, journalist Allison Bethel McKensie, opera singer Barbara Hendricks, artist and author Miles Marshall Lewis and a host of others less notable, many have been contributing their extraordinary talent, unique attributes, flexibility, endurance and unique insights adding a richness to other cultures, which is hardly noticed in contemporary literature.

James Baldwin

In this blog project of mine, I intend to pay tribute to our black American sisters and brothers by reviewing both fiction and non fiction which involve those who live or have lived abroad.

Leroy Haynes

Barbara Hendricks

Delorys Welch-Tyson

Grace Bumbry

Yvette Jarvis

Allison Bethel McKenzie

Jake Lamar

Miles Marshall Lewis

Welcome to my Blaxpat world.