Foreign Tongues and Chocolate Tarts: 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.